The Syli in the Room: Reviving Ahmed Sékou Touré

By Kevin McCleish

Afro-pessimism in its original iteration found use as a medium to explain the phenomenon of perpetual underdevelopment in Africa. As Mahmoud Mamdani notes, Afro-pessimists suggest Africa cannot rejuvenate itself from within due to the persistence of traditional culture. Kevin Ochieng Okoth describes how Afro-pessimism grew from incessant negative depictions of Africa in Western media, which portray an utterly hopeless continent.

In the face of post-independence failing states, raging epidemics, genocide, and worsening inequality, Afro-pessimism resonated with a global audience because it seemed to justify the interventions of actors ranging from saviorist NGOs [1] to agents of structural adjustment programs like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. If Africans proved incapable of solving their problems, a host of others appeared who claimed they could.

Emerging from the academy, what Ochieng calls Afro-pessimism (AP) 2.0 differs from its predecessor by focusing intently on the experience of black Americans and how, as Adolph Reed Jr. often and sarcastically puts it, “nothing has changed” since 1865. Reed describes AP 2.0 as an approach which…

“... postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal ‘anti-blackness.’ Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as the imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world.”

AP 2.0 proponents believe the uniqueness of anti-black oppression prevents collaboration with other oppressed peoples due to fundamental racial antagonism “condemning them to a life of social death.” AP 2.0 therefore hinders the development of the broad, class-conscious coalitions needed to overcome the hegemonic power of capital. This also renders it impotent against imperialism.

Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first post-colonial president of Guinea (1958–1984), understood that fighting imperialism requires collective action across racial and ethnic lines. Touré is best remembered for organizing an electoral rejection of a new French constitution on September 28th, 1958, which prompted immediate political independence for Guinea. Though the referendum was held in France and across all overseas departments and territories, Guinea had the impressive distinction of being the only political unit to vote “no” on the constitution and colonization. Through his organizing efforts, Touré achieved 85% voter turnout with 95% voting against the colonial arrangement.

After becoming president in October 1958, Touré quickly realized that political sovereignty meant little without economic sovereignty. So Touré adopted what he called a “non-capitalist” path of development in recognition that “the anti-imperialist struggle is the climax of class struggle.” Following this path was made all the more difficult by repeated attempts of international sabotage and economic isolation.

A committed pan-Africanist and fierce proponent of nonalignment during the Cold War, Touré played an immense and overlooked role during arguably the most critical juncture in human history: the Cuban Missile Crisis. When President John F. Kennedy directed a naval “quarantine” of Cuba after intelligence showed the construction of nuclear missile sites on the island in response to the American placement of missiles within striking distance of Moscow, the Soviets immediately began planning an airlift of critical military supplies to circumvent the naval blockade. To do so, however, Soviet jets would need to land and refuel prior to reaching the island.

In the fall of 1962, only the five West African countries of Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, and Morocco had airstrips long enough to accommodate jet traffic. To stop an airlift before it ever got off the ground, American officials lobbied African leaders to refuse Soviet air traffic. Though each country had its own set of diplomatic challenges, Washington was most concerned about Guinea.

Touré had just accepted Soviet assistance to improve Conakry’s airport runaways months prior. Coincidentally, though, Touré had also just returned from a state visit to Washington where he and Kennedy made good impressions on one another. Recognizing that the Guinean people had nothing to benefit by obliging the Soviet request, Touré, with his trademark independence, refused. His commitment to what he termed “positive neutrality” gave him the diplomatic flexibility to exercise an inordinate amount of influence during the Cold War. 

Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with the “Grand Syli” (Touré’s nickname; literally “Big Elephant”), are likely to see his revolutionary contributions as a dead end rather than a point of departure. Often overlooked in the Anglophone world, Touré’s radical pedigree, honed from the mass politics of labor organizing, shows how today’s leftists can use labor organizing to facilitate the formation of broad-based coalitions capable of agitating for radical political transformation. Such strategies are a welcome antidote to the alternative approach of AP 2.0, which does not challenge the foundations of the current political economy. 

Radical Roots Sprout a Labor Leader

Touré’s propensity for mass politics came from his poor peasant origins in Faranah, Guinea. As Saidou Mohamed N’Daou recounts, Touré’s social consciousness developed at an early age as he witnessed his deaf mother suffer abuse. His father died early, and mistreatment drove his mother to suicide shortly after. Orphaned at age seven, Touré found loving refuge in his uncle’s family. Touré entered primary school and showed great intellectual promise and an affinity for anti-colonial agitation — from challenging colonial curriculum to organizing protests against a headmaster who forced students to toil in his garden without compensation (the headmaster refused to take responsibility for a student who died of a snakebite whilst laboring in the garden) [2], to leading a food strike, which resulted in his expulsion as a teenager. 

Though his rebelliousness ultimately derailed a promising academic trajectory, Touré’s anti-colonial intransigence ensured he avoided becoming one of the évolués (Africans “civilized” through European education and assimilation) he later came to despise. Had Touré instead complied and wound up in the academy as another “misguided intellectual,” he may have turned out much like his rival and Négritude proponent Leopold Senghor. Touré took issue with Négritude, which — like AP 2.0 — had essentialist foundations.  He dismissed Négritude as a reflection of bourgeois class ideology that merely masked Western cultural imperialism. Touré held that African culture could not be disassociated from political, social, and economic contexts asserting:

“[T]here is no black culture, nor white culture, nor yellow culture…Négritude is thus a false concept, an irrational weapon encouraging…racial discrimination, arbitrarily exercised upon the peoples of Africa, Asia, and upon men of color in America and Europe.”

Rather than ascend to the ivory tower training the colonizer’s comprador class, Touré’s path through vocational school kept him grounded with ordinary Guineans ensuring his exposure and involvement in radical politics.

After several apprenticeships and a year as a clerk in the French Company of Western Africa, Touré passed examinations qualifying him to work in the Post and Telecommunications Department in 1941. Denied the ability to continue his scholarly endeavors through official channels, he continued his studies via correspondence education and took a “Red” turn by devouring the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Despite the French Communist Party’s (PCF) refusal to enroll local members in West Africa (in adherence to the orthodox view that Africa undergo a bourgeois revolution to precede a genuine anti-capitalist revolution), Touré became a founding member of the PCF’s first Guinean study group, Groupes d’Études Communistes, three years later in Conakry. Contemporaries remember the PCF “not being progressive enough” for Touré. But he found them useful to learn organizing methods from.

Not content with merely discussing theories of Marxist revolution, Touré’s political praxis led him to organize the first union in French-controlled Guinea, the Post, Telegram, and Telephone Workers’ Union (PTT), in 1945. The PTT, an affiliate of the PCF-connected French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), flexed its muscle in various labor actions under Touré’s leadership which landed him in jail, but also gave him the credentials necessary to organize the United Trade Union of Guinean Workers (USCG). Under this umbrella union, all CGT affiliates in Guinea consolidated just a year later in 1946. Recognizing “unionism is…a calling…to transform any given economic or social regime, always in search of the beautiful and just,” Touré became the most influential labor leader in French West Africa just five years after forming the first Guinean labor union.

Occurring simultaneously with his ascent in the labor movement, Touré’s reputation as an organizer enabled him to quickly climb the ranks of anti-imperialist political organizations operating in French West Africa, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Formed in 1946 at the Bamako Conference, the RDA, in cooperation with the PCF, attempted to coordinate the efforts of regional anti-imperialist leaders throughout French-occupied Africa. 

While the RDA formed with PCF support, it is mistaken to assume the leaders were all committed to a vision of “Red Africa.”

As it were, the PCF was one of few European political forces committed to anti-imperialism, which forced many associations of convenience. As Elizabeth Schmidt details, under Touré’s direction, the Guinean RDA chapter, later named the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) in 1950, certainly remained committed to the PCF and CGT far longer than its regional peers who feared anti-communist repression when the PCF lost governing power in 1947 France. Although the RDA officially broke from the PCF in 1950, Touré dubiously followed the RDA line in his political activities and continued cooperating with the CGT in his union work. Unlike the RDA in other regions whose membership was comprised of planters and chiefs, the PDG’s core membership were civil servants and trade unionists reluctant to sever ties with communist organizations.

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72-Day Strike and Electoral Victories

Touré soon integrated his labor and political acumen after becoming the secretary-general of the PDG in 1952. From that point forward, his labor and anti-colonial political activities converged into one indivisible force. The French administration felt the power of the peoples’ solidarity during the 72-Day General Strike of 1953, which set the stage for the famous 1958 independence referendum.

Both Schmidt and N’Daou produce excellent accounts of the 72-Day Strike, the impetus of which was a reduction of the workweek from 48 to 40 hours. Though a work reduction is typically welcome, pay fell proportionally by 17%. Guineans, who were already poor,  protested. But French management was unwilling to compromise. So Guinean labor leaders voted to begin a general strike on September 7th, 1953.

As he had done his entire labor career, Touré gave neighborhood speeches to thousands and continued education programs throughout the strike, urging workers to eschew ethnic strife and embrace their common bonds as workers. Composed of various ethnic groups — principally but not exclusively Malinke, Susu, and Peul — Guinea’s ethnic tensions proved more salient in the rural rather than urban areas due to the coercive power of the colonial canton chieftaincies. In the more cosmopolitan Conakry, calls to transcend significant social divisions using an eclectic mix of themes, found in the language of Marxist class antagonism, French liberal ideals, and selected African beliefs of honor, dignity, and racial pride united workers along class lines.

Like any effective organizer, Touré understood that the value of an idea is measured by its social utility. While some critique the “third way socialism” of Touré, it is unlikely Marxist-Leninist proselytization would have had the same impact on participants as his pragmatic ideological flexibility. By December 1953, workers won their wage increase with 80% of Conakry’s workers participating in the labor action. Trade union membership exploded, from 4,600 in the beginning of the strike to 44,000 by 1955. 

Touré’s foundation in and amongst the people is what made him successful. His effective organization of workers and their corresponding communities laid the groundwork for his coming electoral success and the resounding campaign to dismiss colonialism on September 28th, 1958. Touré’s broad-based coalition strategy became apparent leading up to the independence vote, when he campaigned throughout Guinea on behalf of the RDA/PDG, asserting that “the RDA is not a knife that divides, but a needle that sews [together].” Knowing that any anti-colonial coalition could not survive identitarian fragmentation, Touré relied on public pedagogy to elevate the political consciousness of the masses, declaring:

“We are against racial and ethnic prejudice. We are for qualified people whether they be European, Senegalese, Peul, or Bambara. Some of you say you will not vote for the RDA ticket…because a European is on it. This reasoning is stupid.”

Ethnic divisions proved more salient in the rural areas, where colonial-approved chieftains exercised coercive power over taxation, corvée labor [3], and — even though it had been outlawed in 1905 — slavery primarily made up of Dialonka people serving Peul-aristocratic chiefs in the region of Futa Jallon. It is estimated that 25% of the Futa Jallon region’s population were composed of slaves or their descendants in 1955. Residue from the colonizer’s imported Hamitic Hypothesis still plagued many amongst the Peul aristocrats, who believed they were of superior racial stock compared to non-Peul Guineans.

This second-class population divided by class and ethnicity were organized electorally by Touré and the PDG by referencing their exploitation at the hands of the colonial-connected chieftaincy and appealing to Islamic egalitarian principles. Ever pragmatic, Touré omitted Marxist references and spoke plainly about the exploitative conditions enforced by canton chiefs. Doing so, however, he carefully distinguished between their material and ethnic differences to ensure his broad-based coalition remained inclusive to all Guineans.

Communicating his message to overwhelmingly illiterate rural populations elsewhere, he continued in comprehensible terms:

“Man is like water, equal and alike at the beginning. Then some are heated and some are frozen so they become different. Just change the conditions, heat or freeze, and the original equality is again clear.”

Facing historic and manufactured social divisions proved no easy task. But Touré’s inclusive organizing paid off, as demonstrated by the electoral results from 1954 to 1957 where the PDG dominated municipal, regional, and territorial elections. Though the French initially managed to stem the tide of Touré through electoral manipulation, after 1954, the colonizers recognized that continuing to engage in obvious fraud would lead to backlash. It was clear who ruled the streets.

With his newfound legislative and executive authority, Touré set out to destroy the colonial chieftaincy through a parallel power structure of democratically elected PDG local committees who effectively replaced the hated colonial canton chiefs by 1957 and assumed their duties of tax collection and administering justice. After years of power-structure analysis, Touré knew their destruction would be necessary to remove the vestiges of colonial authority.

As president, Touré continued to combat ethnic and religious differences by moving bureaucrats outside of their home regions, banning groups organized on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, surrounding himself with ethnically diverse advisers, and continuing to communicate in various indigenous languages. In such a brief spell of political activity, the man who cut his teeth as an organizer engineered the only electoral rejection of French colonialism and fought against all odds to achieve genuine political and economic sovereignty.

Whose Touré is This?

Although violent resistance against capitalism is often fetishized, any Marxist worth their salt should be able to organize resistance at the point of production. Through his organizing career, the man who not only read Marx’s Capital but had, as Bill Haywood put it, “the marks of capital all over [his] body” from his time on the shop floor, transcended social divisions and united Guineans of all stripes against their colonizer. Recipient of the 1961 Lenin Peace Prize, Touré’s experience should not only be included in the tradition of “Red Africa,” but serve to illustrate the revolutionary possibilities of labor organizing as an alternative to AP 2.0. 

Touré’s ability to unite a diverse population on the basis of class antagonisms proves his mantra that content rather than form supersedes all concerns for those committed to overthrowing capitalism. By focusing on the common denominators and rejecting essentialist obstacles, Touré’s lifelong commitment to construct a better world is instructive. He unequivocally rejected the notion that black people could not exercise political agency, that cooperation amongst demographically diverse groups is impossible, and that a history of slavery precludes meaningful participation in civic life. Rather than accept condemnation to a “life of social death,” Touré instead embodied the words of Frantz Fanon, believing that:

“Man is a yes…Yes to life. Yes to Love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to the scorn of man. No to the degradation of man. No to the exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”

Kevin McCleish is a high school social science teacher and labor organizer from Illinois. His best work is found on the shop floor.

Footnotes

[1] Examples include George Clooney’s Not on Our Watch, which intervened in Darfur, and Invisible Children — the group behind Kony 2012.

[2] Touré does not indicate the headmaster’s race in his recollection. The omission is, perhaps, indicative of his position that imperialism does not operate exclusively along strict racial lines. The colonial education system functioned to maintain existing power relations using white Europeans, black Antilleans, and Africans of the comprador class. Resistance to the system was inherently anti-colonial.

[3] Corvée labor is a system wherein people must work unpaid for a feudal lord for a period.

When Economists Shut Off Your Water

By Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, Somo Abdi, and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah

Republished from Africa Is A Country.

The following account is based on ethnographic research that Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, and Somo Abdi conducted in Kayole Soweto, Nairobi in 2022.

In August 2020, people all over the development world started talking about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of results from a development randomized controlled trial (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto—a relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi—to pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.

There’s no doubt that water is a problem in Nairobi. As Elizabeth Wamuchiru tells us, the water system in the city has a built-in spatial inequality inherited from the British colonial era. Visitors to the city can readily see the differences between the cool, leafy, green neighborhoods of Kilimani and Lavington—segregated white neighborhoods under colonialism, now home to rich Kenyans, foreigners, and NGOs—and the gray and dusty tin-roof neighborhoods of Mathare, Kibera, Mukuru, and Kayole, home to the lower-income Kenyans excluded from Nairobi’s prosperity.

Today’s water system reflects this history of inequality. Nairobi’s water is harnessed from a combination of surface and groundwater sources; however, the city’s groundwater is naturally salty and very high in fluoride. Piped water systems, provided to upper- and middle-income housing estates, do not exist in the vast bulk of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where people must instead buy water from vendors—often salty water pumped from boreholes, or siphoned off from city pipes through rickety connections that are frequently contaminated with sewage. In the richer neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company, a public utility, sells relatively clean piped surface water for a fraction of the price paid by poorer Nairobians—a disparity that research has shown to often be the case in other cities in the global South. As the Mathare Social Justice Centre puts it, in poorer neighborhoods such as Kayole-Soweto, “water provision costs more, is less safe, and is less consistent than in other richer parts of the city.”

Researcher Irene Nduta in Kayole-Soweto.

Nairobi’s waterscape has remained opaque to its planners and administrators as well as its residents—both the elite that occupy the planned leafy suburbs of the city, and the urban underclass that lives on the fringes in a perennial survival mode. And while the city has witnessed major developments to improve access and quality of water, some approaches have only ended up reinforcing the economic inequalities in Nairobi’s waterscape. Such developments have often entailed technologies that are inappropriate for the context, “cut and paste” approaches to solving global South problems, and, in many cases, financing models that are covertly anti-poor.

The World Bank’s water project in Kayole-Soweto was a great example of these problems. Between 2016 and 2018, the World Bank and Nairobi Water Company implemented a project to build piped water and sewage connections in Kayole-Soweto among several other lower-income neighborhoods in Nairobi.

The project design was driven by the kind of “neoliberalism lite” that characterizes the Millenium Development Goals-era World Bank. The project’s water connections would be paid for only in part by World Bank grants. The rest of the cost would be borne by users, who would take out loans of $315 USD per connection, payable over five years at an interest rate of 19%. Each property would get a single connection, with a water tap and a flushing toilet. Under a program called Jisomee Mita (“read your own meter”), water meters would be digital, and billing payment can be made digitally via mobile phone. The project was framed as a “magic bullet” that not only embraced the supposed advantages of digitized systems, but also provided a financial model purportedly tailored to the needs of the poor of Kayole-Soweto.

As people in Kayole-Soweto told us, the project was plagued with problems right from the onset (some of these problems are even described in the World Bank’s own 2019 project evaluation). The water supply pipes were supposed to be buried several meters under the streets, but instead were scarcely buried below the surface of Soweto’s dirt roads, often allowing sewage to leak into the pipes. The sewage piping, which World Bank officials told community members would be eight inches in diameter, was instead four inches, thus resulting in constant blockages. No one was sure why implementation wasn’t done to the standard promised, but corruption was widely suspected.

One of the World Bank-built water lines running through sewage in Kayole-Soweto.

And, people told us, when trying to pay back their water connection loans, they found Nairobi Water Company’s billing and payment systems to be opaque at best and criminal at worst. One man told us: “I went and paid, but after paying it… I followed up on that payment, and… I was told that I haven’t paid this money. And I went back [and] I paid for it again. And that’s how I lost [Ksh] 4,900” (about $42 USD). Receipts are nonexistent; statements are nonexistent; people pay, and their money often simply disappears.

And while continuing to largely meet demand in the wealthier neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company has resorted to what it calls “micro-rationing” in Kayole-Soweto. Water is typically only piped in one day per week, for a few hours at a time. People will hurry to fill jerrycans of water for the week during these few hours—and if they’re at work when the water comes, then they’re out of luck. Often, Nairobi Water Company will pipe in salty borehole water instead of the clean water that residents were promised they’d receive. And, for many customers, water has stopped flowing entirely, for weeks, months, or even years at a time, with no explanation. But even in such cases, Nairobi Water Company still insists that people make payments on their water connection loans—paying down their debt for a connection that provides them with no water. “Unalipia hewa,” one man told us—“you pay for air.”

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The RCT: adding insult to injury

In 2018, two American development economists, Paul Gertler and Sebastian Galiani, started a randomized controlled trial (RCT) aimed at “improving revenue collection efficiency” on the debt that property owners owed on these water connection loans in Kayole-Soweto. Their argument: the problem with water supply in Kayole-Soweto isn’t any of the problems that we described above. The problem is simply that property owners aren’t paying their water bills, thus undermining Nairobi Water Company’s revenue and preventing them from supplying water. (Our finding was the exact reverse: many people stopped making payments on their connection loans out of frustration at water that flowed only a few hours one day per week, if at all.)

In order to test a punitive method for fixing this problem, these two economists turned to an RCT. The RCT, a popular method in development economics for the last two decades, is used to test a development intervention by (1) randomly dividing people into “treatment” and “control” groups; (2) giving some “treatment” to the first group, while withholding it from the second; and (3) measuring the difference in outcomes. While pioneers of the method were rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, critics are wary of the idea of development economists experimenting on the poor.

In this case, the economists, working with Nairobi Water Company and the World Bank, identified customers who were behind on their water connection loan payments, divided these randomly into treatment and control groups, and disconnected the water at treatment properties, but not at control properties. They found that disconnecting people’s water had a large positive impact on repayment rates (as one person put it during the Twitter controversy: “uh, duh?”). This is rigorous proof, they argue, that water disconnections can help improve a water utility’s revenue enforcement. The authors of this experiment don’t mention the myriad problems with Nairobi Water Company or with Nairobi’s water system more generally.

A map from the publication reporting this RCT’s results, showing how households in Kayole-Soweto were randomly assigned to “treatment” or “control” groups.

Now, let’s unpack this a bit. This experiment would have been ethically dubious in a context in which water service was working perfectly. This experiment is that much more ethically bankrupt in a context in which the water system is as woefully dysfunctional as it is in Kayole-Soweto. Just to give one example of the ethical acrobatics in the economists’ publication describing this project: research guidelines in the US, where both of these development economists hold professorships, dictate that research subjects are supposed to consent to participation in any research, let alone an experiment. The authors tell us that tenants whose water was disconnected had in effect pre-consented to disconnection by the fact of having signed a contract to get the water connection loan in which it is written that your water will be disconnected if you fail to pay. This very “thin” understanding of consent ignores the question of obtaining consent to participate in the experiment—and it also doesn’t apply to the tenants living at these properties, who never signed any such contract, and who also lost their water.

We told several property owners whose water was shut off during the experiment that the economists who ran this experiment said in their publication that the experiment didn’t cause any harm to these research subjects. (It’s important to note that most of these property owners aren’t rich—most of the property owners we talked to live in a slightly nicer unit alongside their tenants.) Matthew, a property owner we interviewed, told us how, when his property’s water was disconnected, several people living at his property—a disabled woman, as well his own 95-year-old grandmother—were forced into the indignity of defecating in basins, which his wife would dump in the Ngong River. Another property owner, Kelvin, told us simply, “We don’t have water and water is life. So, how can you say it doesn’t harm anyone, how, how?”

What can we learn from this?

Water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. Into this unjust context came, first, the World Bank, with a neoliberal project plan emphasizing “cost-sharing,” and with a naive and misplaced trust in the ability of Nairobi Water Company to carry out this project fairly; and, second, two development economists, who were willing to treat poor Sowetans like guinea pigs, and who simply took Nairobi Water Company at their word when the company said that the only problem with water in Kayole-Soweto was that people weren’t paying their bills. Were these just scare tactics to squeeze residents into paying for a service they deemed unreliable? Was this a question of the ugly side of a capitalist market model that is insensitive to the plight of the poor and continues to disinherit them of their right to the city?

The World Bank has, since 2000, stepped back from the stringent structural adjustment plans that the Bank imposed on one African nation after another in the 1980s and 1990s. They now tend to focus their energies on projects like this one, often implemented together with African governments, and often focused on enhancing state capacity to fill its citizens’ basic needs. But the neoliberal ideology, while toned down, is still there: the Bank’s insistence that users pay a large share of the water connection cost, via a private bank loan, is characteristic of this new and more subtle neoliberalism.

In relation to experimentation, and development RCTs, there’s something scary about the degree of power that Western academics can exercise over poor people in places like Kayole-Soweto. To be clear, we aren’t saying that this experiment is typical of development RCTs. In our research, we found this water disconnection RCT to be a very extreme example; most RCTs are conducted with fairly or even very good ethical practices. What this experiment shows, though, is that if a foreign researcher wants to carry out an unethical RCT in a place like Kenya, they can. Existing ethical safeguards are obviously not working.

In finding a way forward for the World Bank’s water project in Kayole-Soweto, we must defer to the demands of the Sowetans we met and interviewed. Repeatedly, they told us that they were very willing to pay for water—if that water service worked, and worked consistently. They told us that they wanted the World Bank to return to the community, to hold meetings with community members, and, with their input, to rebuild the water and sewage infrastructure in Kayole-Soweto to a proper standard. We believe that the World Bank owes this to the people of Kayole-Soweto.

As for the economists and others running RCTs in Kenya, the existing system of ethical safeguards clearly failed the people of Kayole-Soweto. We will set aside the argument that experiments conducted by global North researchers on poor people in the global South should not happen at all. The fallout from this experiment has led to suggestions for reforms to the research approval, funding, and publication processes, in order to ensure that ethical principles are actually followed. Echoing these suggestions, we would encourage actors in this research space to introduce mechanisms to ensure that safeguards are not optional but rather mandatory. And we believe that there should be an ethical mandate of genuine “equipoise” in development RCTs: researchers should be genuinely uncertain whether the “treatment” or the “control” is better for the research subjects. (In the experiment in Kayole-Soweto, that was obviously not the case.)

Finally, the Nairobi County government is currently debating a bill that could privatize Nairobi Water Company. We believe that privatization is not the solution for water in Nairobi. In the Kenyan health care system, for example, we have consistently learned that privatization does not serve the poor. Past examples of water privatization—in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the late 1990s and, closer to home, in Dar es Salaam in the 2000s—ended in complete failure. We strongly believe that reform and democratized governance—not privatization—of Nairobi Water Company should be part of the way forward. And in the context of the ongoing crisis over the escalating cost of living, we believe strongly that a privatized water company will be that much less likely to ensure that water is affordable (if not free) for even the poorest Nairobians. Water justice, as enshrined in Kenya’s 2010 constitution, must be made a reality for poor people living in precarious urban neighborhoods like Kayole-Soweto. We echo the words of Mathare Social Justice Center: “maji ni uhai, maji ni haki”—water is life, water is a right.

Adrian Wilson is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Faith Kasina is a community activist with the Kayole Community Justice Centre.

Irene Nduta is a community activist with the Kayole Community Justice Centre.

Jethron Ayumbah Akallah is a lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Maseno University.

Burkina Faso’s New President Condemns Imperialism, Quotes Che Guevara, and Allies with Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba

[Pictured: Burkina Faso’s Revolutionary President, Ibrahim Traoré (center), attends the closing ceremony of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou on March 4, 2023. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP]

By Ben Norton

Republished from Geopolitical Economy Report.

The new president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed to fight imperialism and neocolonialism, invoking his country’s past revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara and quoting Che Guevara.

The West African nation has also formed close diplomatic ties with the revolutionary governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, as well as with NATO’s arch-rival Russia.

In January 2022, a group of nationalist military officers in Burkina Faso toppled the president, Roch Kaboré, a wealthy banker who had fostered close ties with the country’s former colonizer, France, where he was educated.

The military officers declared a government run by what they call the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR), led by a new president, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.

They pledged to seek true independence from French hegemony, condemning the neocolonial policies and economic, political, and military control that Paris still exercises over Francophone West Africa.

Burkina Faso ended its decades-long military agreement with France, expelling the hundreds of French troops that had been in the country for years.

The new president, Damiba, was initially popular. But support waned as he was unable to defeat the deadly Salafi-jihadist insurgents that have destabilized the country.

In September 2022, discontent led to a subsequent coup in Burkina Faso, which brought to power another nationalist military leader named Ibrahim Traoré. He was just 34 at the time, making him one of the world’s youngest leaders.

Traoré has pledged to carry out a “refoundation of the nation” and comprehensive “modernization”, to quell violent extremism, fight corruption, and “totally reform our system of government”.

The charismatic Burkinabè leader frequently ends his speeches with the chant “La patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons!”, the French translation of the official motto of revolutionary Cuba: “Patria o muerte, venceremos!” – “Homeland or death, we will prevail!”

As president, Traoré has brought back some of the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Sankara.

Sankara was a Marxist Burkinabè military officer and committed pan-Africanist who ascended to power in a 1983 coup.

Sankara launched a socialist revolution, transforming the impoverished country through land reform, infrastructure development, and expansive public health and literacy programs.

Under Sankara’s leadership, Burkina Faso also challenged French neocolonialism and pursued an anti-imperialist foreign policy, forming alliances with revolutionary struggles across the Global South.

These leftist policies were reversed in 1987, when Sankara was overthrown and killed in another coup, led by his former ally Blaise Compaoré – who subsequently moved hard to the right and allied with the United States and France, ruling through rigged elections until 2014.

Today, Ibrahim Traoré is drawing heavily on the legacy of Sankara. He has made it clear that he wants West Africa, and the continent as a whole, to be free of Western neocolonialism.

This July, the Russian government held a Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg. Traoré was the first African leader to arrive to the conference. There, he delivered a fiery anti-imperialist speech.

“We are the forgotten peoples of the world. And we are here now to talk about the future of our countries, about how things will be tomorrow in the world that we are seeking to build, and in which there will be no interference in our internal affairs”, Traoré said, according to a partial transcript published by Russian state media outlet TASS.

TASS reported:

In his speech, the Burkinabe head of state also focused on sovereignty and the struggle against imperialism. “Why does resource-rich Africa remain the poorest region of the world? We ask these questions and get no answers. However, we have the opportunity to build new relationships that will help us build a better future for Burkina Faso,” the president said. African countries have suffered for decades from a barbaric and brutal form of colonialism and imperialism, which could be called a modern form of slavery, he stressed.

“However, a slave who does not fight [for his freedom] is not worthy of any indulgence. The heads of African states should not behave like puppets in the hands of the imperialists. We must ensure that our countries are self-sufficient, including as regards food supplies, and can meet all of the needs of our peoples. Glory and respect to our peoples; victory to our peoples! Homeland or death!” Traore summed up, quoting the words of legendary Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The 35-year-old president of Burkina Faso was attired in a camouflage uniform and red beret during the summit.

On July 29, Traoré had a private meeting in Saint Petersburgh with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In their talks, the Burkinabè leader praised the Soviet Union for defeating Nazism in World War II.

Burkina Faso strengthens ties with Latin American revolutionary movements

The new nationalist government in Burkina Faso has also sought to deepen its ties with revolutionary movements in Latin America.

In May, the West African nation’s prime minister, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, traveled to Venezuela.

Tambèla met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who pledged to “advance in cooperation, solidarity, and growth… building a solid fraternal relation”.

In July, the Burkinabè prime minister traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the 44th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution.

Tambèla attended the July 19 celebration of the revolution in Managua, at the invitation of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Following the September 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, the new president, Traoré, surprised many observers by choosing as his prime minister a longtime follower of Thomas Sankara, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla.

Tambèla was an ally of Sankara during the Burkinabè revolution. When Sankara came to power in the 1980s, Tambèla organized a solidarity movement and sought international support for the new leftist government.

Tambèla is a pan-Africanist and has been affiliated with communist and left-wing organizations.

Traoré said in a speech in December that Tambèla will help to oversee the process of the “refoundation of the nation“.

By appointing Tambèla as prime minister, Traoré tangibly showed his commitment to reviving the revolutionary legacy of Sankara.

In his remarks at the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Tambèla discussed the historical legacy of solidarity between the revolution in Burkina Faso and that of Nicaragua.

Burkina Faso’s President Thomas Sankara with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega in 1986.

Tambèla recalled that Sankara visited Nicaragua in 1986, and the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega visited Burkina Faso that same year.

When he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in 1984, Sankara declared,

I wish also to feel close to my comrades of Nicaragua, whose ports are being mined, whose towns are being bombed and who, despite all, face up with courage and lucidity to their fate. I suffer with all those in Latin America who are suffering from imperialist domination.

In 1984 and 1986, Sankara also visited Cuba, where he met with revolutionary President Fidel Castro.

“For people of my generation, there are things that unite us with Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and Commander Daniel Ortega”, Burkinabè Prime Minister Tambèla said in his speech in Managua on July 19, 2023.

“We have learned to know Nicaragua. When the liberation struggle began, I was small, but we followed, day by day, the context of Nicaragua’s liberation. I went in July of ’79, and when they entered Managua we were happy, people of my age celebrated that”, he recalled.

And then, when Thomas Sankara came to power, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Revolution was something happy for us; we as students studied a lot the history of Nicaragua, we followed its evolution.

Tambèla added that Burkina Faso supported Nicaragua in its International Court of Justice case against the United States. Washington was found guilty of illegally sponsoring far-right “Contra” death squads, which waged a terror war against the leftist government, as well as putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports. (Yet, although Nicaragua won the case in 1986, the U.S. government has still to this day refused to pay the Central American nation a single cent of the reparations that it legally owes it.)

“Nicaragua’s struggle is also that of our people”, Tambèla stressed.

In his July 19 speech, the Burkinabè prime minister also sent special greetings to the diplomatic delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

“We have very close relations with Cuba”, Tambèla added.

President Fidel Castro has been and was a very important person for the revolution in Africa; we have excellent memories, both of Cuba and of President Fidel Castro.

Ben Norton is an investigative journalist and analyst. He is the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report, and is based in Latin America. (Publicaciones en español aquí.)

Niger Is the Fourth Country in the Sahel to Experience an Anti-Western Coup

By Vijay Prashad and Kambale Musavuli

Republished from Independent Media Institute’s Globetrotter report.

At 3 a.m. on July 26, 2023, the presidential guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Troops, led by Brigadier General Abdourahmane Tchiani closed the country’s borders and declared a curfew. The coup d’état was immediately condemned by the Economic Community of West African States, by the African Union, and by the European Union. Both France and the United States—which have military bases in Niger—said that they were watching the situation closely. A tussle between the Army—which claimed to be pro-Bazoum—and the presidential guard threatened the capital, but it soon fizzled out. On July 27, General Abdou Sidikou Issa of the army released a statement saying that he would accept the situation to “avoid a deadly confrontation between the different forces which… could cause a bloodbath.” Brigadier General Tchiani went on television on July 28 to announce that he was the new president of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie or CNSP).

The coup in Niger follows similar coups in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021) and Burkina Faso (January 2022 and September 2022), and Guinea (September 2021). Each of these coups was led by military officers angered by the presence of French and U.S. troops and by the permanent economic crises inflicted on their countries. This region of Africa—the Sahel—has faced a cascade of crises: the desiccation of the land due to the climate catastrophe, the rise of Islamic militancy due to the 2011 NATO war in Libya, the increase in smuggling networks to traffic weapons, humans, and drugs across the desert, the appropriation of natural resources—including uranium and gold—by Western companies that have simply not paid adequately for these riches, and the entrenchment of Western military forces through the construction of bases and the operation of these armies with impunity.

Two days after the coup, the CNSP announced the names of the 10 officers who lead the CNSP. They come from the entire range of the armed forces, from the army (General Mohamed Toumba) to the Air Force (Colonel Major Amadou Abouramane) to the national police (Deputy General Manager Assahaba Ebankawel). It is by now clear that one of the most influential members of the CNSP is General Salifou Mody, former chief of staff of the military and leader in the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, which led the February 2010 coup against President Mamadou Tandja and which governed Niger until Bazoum’s predecessor Mahamadou Issoufou won the 2011 presidential election. It was during Issoufou’s time in office that the United States government built the world’s largest drone base in Agadez and that the French special forces garrisoned the city of Irlit on behalf of the uranium mining company Orano (formerly a part of Areva).

It is important to note that General Salifou Mody is perceived as an influential member of CNSP given his influence in the army and his international contacts. On February 28, 2023, Mody met with the United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley during the African Chiefs of Defense Conference in Rome to discuss “regional stability, including counterterrorism cooperation and the continued fight against violent extremism in the region.” On March 9, Mody visited Mali to meet with Colonel Assimi Goïta and the Chief of Staff of the Malian army General Oumar Diarra to strengthen military cooperation between Niger and Mali. A few days later on March 16, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Niger to meet with Bazoum. In what many in Niger perceived as a sidelining of Mody, he was appointed on June 1 as the Nigerien ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. Mody, it is said in Niamey, is the voice in the ear of Brigadier General Tchiani, the titular head of state.

Corruption and the West

A highly informed source in Niger tells us that the reason why the military moved against Bazoum is that “he’s corrupt, a pawn of France. Nigerians were fed up with him and his gang. They are in the process of arresting the members of the deposed system, who embezzled public funds, many of whom have taken refuge in foreign embassies.” The issue of corruption hangs over Niger, a country with one of the world’s most lucrative uranium deposits. The “corruption” that is talked about in Niger is not about petty bribes by government officials, but about an entire structure—developed during French colonial rule—that prevents Niger from establishing sovereignty over its raw materials and over its development.

At the heart of the “corruption” is the so-called “joint venture” between Niger and France called Société des mines de l’Aïr (Somaïr), which owns and operates the uranium industry in the country. Strikingly, 85 percent of Somaïr is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies, while only 15 percent is owned by Niger’s government. Niger produces over 5 percent of the world’s uranium, but its uranium is of a very high quality. Half of Niger’s export receipts are from sales of uranium, oil, and gold. One in three lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium from Niger, at the same time as 42 percent of the African country’s population lived below the poverty line. The people of Niger have watched their wealth slip through their fingers for decades. As a mark of the government’s weakness, over the course of the past decade, Niger has lost over $906 million in only 10 arbitration cases brought by multinational corporations before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the International Chamber of Commerce.

France stopped using the franc in 2002 when it switched to the Euro system. But, fourteen former French colonies continued to use the Communauté Financiére Africaine (CFA), which gives immense advantages to France (50 percent of the reserves of these countries have to be held in the French Treasury and France’s devaluations of the CFA—as in 1994—have catastrophic effects on the country’s that use it). In 2015, Chad’s president Idriss Déby Itno said that the CFA “pulls African economies down” and that the “time had come to cut the cord that prevents Africa from developing.” Talk now across the Sahel is for not only the removal of French troops—as has taken place in Burkina Faso and in Mali—but of a break with the French economic hold on the region.

The New Non-Alignment

At the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit in July, Burkina Faso’s leader, President Ibrahim Traoré wore a red beret that echoed the uniform of the assassinated socialist leader of his country, Thomas Sankara. Traoré reacted strongly to the condemnation of the military coups in the Sahel, including to a recent visit to his country by an African Union delegation. “A slave that does not rebel does not deserve pity,” he said. “The African Union must stop condemning Africans who decide to fight against their own puppet regimes of the West.”

In February, Burkina Faso had hosted a meeting that included the governments of Mali and Guinea. On the agenda is the creation of a new federation of these states. It is likely that Niger will be invited into these conversations.

Mapping U.S. Imperialism

By The Mapping Project

Republished from Monthly Review.

The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

–Hugo Chavez

The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

–Xoài Pham

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

–Frantz Fanon

U.S. imperialism is the greatest threat to life on the planet, a force of ecological devastation and disaster impacting not only human beings, but also our non-human relatives. How can we organize to dismantle the vast and complicated network of U.S. imperialism which includes U.S. war and militarism, CIA intervention, U.S. weapons/technology/surveillance corporations, political and economic support for dictatorships, military juntas, death squads and U.S. trained global police forces favorable to U.S. geopolitical interests, U.S. imposed sanctions, so-called “humanitarian interventions,” genetically modified grassroots organizations, corporate media’s manipulation of spontaneous protest, and U.S. corporate sponsorship of political repression and regime change favorable to U.S. corporate interests?

This article deals with U.S. imperialism since World War 2. It is critical to acknowledge that U.S. imperialism emanates both ideologically and materially from the crime of colonialism on this continent which has killed over 100 million indigenous people and approximately 150 million African people over the past 500 years.

The exact death toll of U.S. imperialism is both staggering and impossible to know. What we do know is that since World War 2, U.S. imperialism has killed at least 36 million people globally in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, the Congo, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Chad, Libya, East Timor, Grenada, Honduras, Iran, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Sudan, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Somalia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Palestine (see Appendix).

This list does not include other aspects of U.S. imperialist aggression which have had a devastating and lasting impact on communities worldwide, including torture, imprisonment, rape, and the ecological devastation wrought by the U.S. military through atomic bombs, toxic waste and untreated sewage dumping by over 750 military bases in over 80 countries. The U.S. Department of Defense consumes more petroleum than any institution in the world. In the year of 2017 alone, the U.S. military emitted 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, a carbon footprint greater than that of most nations worldwide. This list also does not include the impact of U.S. fossil fuel consumption and U.S. corporate fossil fuel extraction, fracking, agribusiness, mining, and mono-cropping, all of which are part and parcel of the extractive economy of U.S. imperialism.

U.S. military bases around the world. (Photo: Al Jazeera)

One central mechanism of U.S. imperialism is “dollar hegemony” which forces countries around the world to conduct international trade in U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars are backed by U.S. bonds (instead of gold or industrial stocks) which means a country can only cash in one American IOU for another. When the U.S. offers military aid to friendly nations, this aid is circulated back to U.S. weapons corporations and returns to U.S. banks. In addition, U.S. dollars are also backed by U.S. bombs: any nation that threatens to nationalize resources or go off the dollar (i.e. Iraq or Libya) is threatened with a military invasion and/or a U.S. backed coup.

U.S. imperialism has also been built through “soft power” organizations like USAID, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of American States (OAS). These nominally international bodies are practically unilateral in their subservience to the interests of the U.S. state and U.S. corporations. In the 1950s and ‘60s, USAID (and its precursor organizations) made “development aid” to Asian, African, and South American countries conditional on those countries’ legal formalization of capitalist property relations, and reorganization of their economies around homeownership debt. The goal was to enclose Indigenous land, and land shared through alternate economic systems, as a method of “combatting Communism with homeownership” and creating dependency and buy-in to U.S. capitalist hegemony (Nancy Kwak, A World of Homeowners). In order to retain access to desperately needed streams of resources (e.g. IMF “loans”), Global South governments are forced to accept resource-extraction by the U.S., while at the same time denying their own people popularly supported policies such as land reform, economic diversification, and food sovereignty. It is also important to note that Global South nations have never received reparations or compensation for the resources that have been stolen from them–this makes the idea of “loans” by global monetary institutions even more outrageous.

The U.S. also uses USAID and other similarly functioning international bodies to suppress and to undermine anti-imperialist struggle inside “friendly” countries. Starting in the 1960s, USAID funded police training programs across the globe under a counterinsurgency model, training foreign police as a “first line of defense against subversion and insurgency.” These USAID-funded police training programs involved surveillance and the creation of biometric databases to map entire populations, as well as programs of mass imprisonment, torture, and assassination. After experimenting with these methods in other countries, U.S. police departments integrated many of them into U.S. policing, especially the policing of BIPOC communities here (see our entry on the Boston Police Department). At the same time, the U.S. uses USAID and other soft power funding bodies to undermine revolutionary, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements, by funding “safe” reformist alternatives, including a global network of AFL-CIO managed “training centers” aimed at fostering a bureaucratic union culture similar to the one in the U.S., which keeps labor organizing loyal to capitalism and to U.S. global dominance. (See our entries on the AFL-CIO and the Harvard Trade Union Program.)

U.S. imperialism intentionally fosters divisions between different peoples and nations, offering (relative) rewards to those who choose to cooperate with U.S. dictates (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Colombia), while brutally punishing those who do not (e.g. Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). In this way, U.S. imperialism creates material conditions in which peoples and governments face a choice: 1. accommodate the interests of U.S. Empire and allow the U.S. to develop your nation’s land and sovereign resources in ways which enrich the West; or, 2. attempt to use your land and your sovereign resources to meet the needs of your own people and suffer the brutality of U.S. economic and military violence.

The Harvard Kennedy School: Training Ground for U.S. Empire and the Security State

The Mapping Project set out to map local U.S. imperialist actors (involved in both material and ideological support for U.S. imperialism) on the land of Massachusett, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas) and to analyze how these institutions interacted with other oppressive local and global institutions that are driving colonization of indigenous lands here and worldwide, local displacement/ethnic cleansing (“gentrification”), policing, and zionist imperialism.

A look at just one local institution on our map, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, demonstrates the level of ideological and material cooperation required for the machinery of U.S. imperialism to function. (All information outlined below is taken from The Mapping Project entries and links regarding the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Please see this link for hyperlinked source material.)

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government and its historical precursors have hosted some of the most infamous war criminals and architects of empire: Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Susan Rice (an HKS fellow), Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Larry Summers. HKS also currently hosts Ricardo Hausmann, founder and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab , the academic laboratory of the U.S. backed Venezuelan coup.

In How Harvard Rules, John Trumpbour documents the central role Harvard played in the establishment of the Cold War academic-military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism post-WWII (How Harvard Rules, 51). Trumpbour highlights the role of the Harvard Kennedy School under Dean Graham Allison (1977-1989), in particular, recounting that Dean Allison ran an executive education program for Pentagon officials at Harvard Kennedy (HHR 68). Harvard Kennedy School’s support for the U.S. military and U.S. empire continues to this day. HKS states on its website:

Harvard Kennedy School, because of its mission to train public leaders and its depth of expertise in the study of defense and international security, has always had a particularly strong relationship with the U.S. Armed Forces. This relationship is mutually beneficial. The School has provided its expertise to branches of the U.S. military, and it has given military personnel (active and veteran) access to Harvard’s education and training.

The same webpage further notes that after the removal of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) from Harvard Kennedy School in 1969, “under the leadership of Harvard President Drew Faust, the ROTC program was reinstated in 2011, and the Kennedy School’s relationship with the military continues to grow more robust each year.”

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In particular, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs provides broad support to the U.S. military and the objectives of U.S. empire. The Belfer Center is co-directed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (a war hawk who has advocated for a U.S. invasion of North Korea and U.S. military build ups against Russia and Iran) and former Pentagon Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach. Programs within HKS Belfer Center include the Center’s “Intelligence Program,” which boasts that it “acquaints students and Fellows with the intelligence community and its strengths and weaknesses for policy making,” further noting, “Discussions with active and retired intelligence practitioners, scholars of intelligence history, law, and other disciplines, help students and Fellows prepare to best use the information available through intelligence agencies.” Alongside HKS Belfer’s Intelligence Program, is the Belfer Center’s “Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship.” The Belfer Center claims that, under the direction of Belfer Center co-directors Ashton Carter and Eric Rosenbach, the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship “educates the next generation of thought leaders in national and international intelligence.”

As noted above, the Harvard Kennedy School serves as an institutional training ground for future servants of U.S. empire and the U.S. national security state. HKS also maintains a close relationship with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As reported by Inside Higher Ed in their 2017 review of Spy Schools by Daniel Golden:

[Harvard Kennedy School] currently allows the agency [the CIA] to send officers to the midcareer program at the Kennedy School of Government while continuing to act undercover, with the school’s knowledge. When the officers apply–often with fudged credentials that are part of their CIA cover–the university doesn’t know they’re CIA agents, but once they’re in, Golden writes, Harvard allows them to tell the university that they’re undercover. Their fellow students, however–often high-profile or soon-to-be-high-profile actors in the world of international diplomacy–are kept in the dark.

Kenneth Moskow is one of a long line of CIA officers who have enrolled undercover at the Kennedy School, generally with Harvard’s knowledge and approval, gaining access to up-and-comers worldwide,” Golden writes. “For four decades the CIA and Harvard have concealed this practice, which raises larger questions about academic boundaries, the integrity of class discussions and student interactions, and whether an American university has a responsibility to accommodate U.S. intelligence.”

In addition to the CIA, HKS has direct relationships with the FBI, the U.S. Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NERAC, and numerous branches of the U.S. Armed Forces:

• Chris Combs, a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership has held numerous positions within the FBI;

• Jeffrey A. Tricoli, who serves as Section Chief of the FBI’s Cyber Division since December 2016 (prior to which he held several other positions within the FBI) was a keynote speaker at “multiple sessions” of the HKS’s Cybersecurity Executive Education program;

• Jeff Fields, who is Fellow at both the Cyber Project and the Intelligence Project of HKS’s Belfer Center currently serves as a Supervisory Special Agent within the National Security Division of the FBI;

• HKS hosted former FBI director James Comey for a conversation with HKS Belfer Center’s Co-Director (and former Pentagon Chief of Staff) Eric Rosenbach in 2020;

• Government spending records show yearly tuition payments from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Homeland Security personnel attending special HKS seminars on Homeland Security under HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership;

• Northeast Homeland Security Regional Advisory Council meeting minutes from February 2022 list “Edward Chao: Analyst, Harvard Kennedy School,” as a NERAC “Council Member”; and

• Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Air force have created multiple fellowships aimed at recruiting U.S. Air Force service members to pursue degrees at HKS. The Air Force’s CSAF Scholars Master Fellowship, for example, aims to “prepare mid-career, experienced professionals to return to the Air Force ready to assume significant leadership positions in an increasingly complex environment.” In 2016, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf welcomed Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James to Harvard Kennedy School, in a speech in which Elmendorf highlighted his satisfaction that the ROTC program, including Air Force ROTC, had been reinstated at Harvard (ROTC had been removed from campus following mass faculty protests in 1969).

Harvard Kennedy School’s web.

The Harvard Kennedy School and the War Economy

HKS’s direct support of U.S. imperialism does not limit itself to ideological and educational support. It is deeply enmeshed in the war economy driven by the interests of the U.S. weapons industry.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, L3 Harris, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman are global corporations who supply the United States government with broad scale military weaponry and war and surveillance technologies. All these companies have corporate leadership who are either alumni of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (HKS), who are currently contributing to HKS as lecturers/professors, and/or who have held leadership positions in U.S. federal government.

Lockheed Martin Vice President for Corporate Business Development Leo Mackay is a Harvard Kennedy School alumnus (MPP ’91), was a Fellow in the HKS Belfer Center International Security Program (1991-92) and served as the “military assistant” to then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Ashton Carter, who would soon go on to become co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. Following this stint at the U.S. Pentagon, Mackay landed in the U.S. weapons industry at Lockheed Martin.  Lockheed Martin Vice President Marcel Lettre is an HKS alumni and prior to joining Lockheed Martin, Lettre spent eight years in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The U.S. DoD has dished out a whopping $540.82 billion to date in contracts with Lockheed Martin for the provision of products and services to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and other branches of the U.S. military. Lockheed Martin Board of Directors member Jeh Johnson has lectured at Harvard Kennedy School and is the former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for carrying out the U.S. federal government’s regime of tracking, detentions, and deportations of Black and Brown migrants. (Retired) General Joseph F. Dunford is currently a member of two Lockheed Martin Board of Director Committees and a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Belfer Center. Dunford was a U.S. military leader, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander of all U.S. and NATO Forces in Afghanistan. Dunford also serves on the board of the Atlantic Council, itself a cutout organization of NATO and the U.S. security state which crassly promotes the interests of U.S. empire. Mackay, Lettre, Johnson, and Dunford’s respective career trajectories provide an emblematic illustration of the grotesque revolving door which exists between elite institutions of knowledge production like the Harvard Kennedy School, the U.S. security state (which feeds its people into those elite institutions and vice versa), and the U.S. weapons industry (which seeks business from the U.S. security state).

Similar revolving door phenomena are notable among the Harvard Kennedy School and Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman. HKS Professor Meghan O’Sullivan currently serves on the board of Massachusetts-based weapons manufacturer Raytheon. O’Sullivan is also deeply enmeshed within America’s security state, currently sitting on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served as “special assistant” to President George W. Bush (2004-07) where she was “Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan,” helping oversee the U.S. invasions and occupations of these nations during the so-called “War on Terror.” O’Sullivan has openly attempted to leverage her position as Harvard Kennedy School to funnel U.S. state dollars into Raytheon: In April 2021, O’Sullivan penned an article in the Washington Post entitled “It’s Wrong to Pull Troops Out of Afghanistan. But We Can Minimize the Damage.” As reported in the Harvard Crimson, O’Sullivan’s author bio in this article highlighted her position as a faculty member of Harvard Kennedy (with the perceived “expertise” affiliation with HKS grants) but failed to acknowledge her position on the Board of Raytheon, a company which had “a $145 million contract to train Afghan Air Force pilots and is a major supplier of weapons to the U.S. military.” Donn Yates who works in Domestic and International Business Development at Boeing’s T-7A Redhawk Program was a National Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2015-16. Don Yates also spent 23 years in the U.S. Air Force. Former Northrop Grumman Director for Strategy and Global Relations John Johns is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy’s National and International Security Program. Johns also spent “seven years as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Maintenance establishing policy for, and leading oversight of the Department’s annual $80B weapon system maintenance program and deployed twice in support of security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The largest U.S. oil firms are also closely interlocked with these top weapons companies, which have also diversified their technological production for the security industry–providing services for pipeline and energy facility security, as well as border security. This means that the same companies are profiting at every stage in the cycle of climate devastation: they profit from wars for extraction; from extraction; and from the militarized policing of people forced to migrate by climate disaster. Exxon Mobil (the 4th largest fossil fuel firm) contracts with General Dynamics, L3 Harris, and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin, the top weapons company in the world, shares board members with Chevron, and other global fossil fuel companies. (See Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action.)

The Harvard Kennedy School and U.S. Support for Israel

U.S. imperialist interests in West Asia are directly tied to U.S. support of Israel. This support is not only expressed through tax dollars but through ideological and diplomatic support for Israel and advocacy for regional normalization with Israel.

Harvard Kennedy School is home to the Wexner Foundation. Through its “Israel Fellowship,” The Wexner Foundation awards ten scholarships annually to “outstanding public sector directors and leaders from Israel,” helping these individuals to pursue a Master’s in Public Administration at the Kennedy School. Past Wexner fellows include more than 25 Israeli generals and other high-ranking military and police officials. Among them is the Israeli Defense Force’s current chief of general staff, Aviv Kochavi, who is directly responsible for the bombardment of Gaza in May 2021. Kochavi also is believed to be one of the 200 to 300 Israeli officials identified by Tel Aviv as likely to be indicted by the International Criminal Court’s probe into alleged Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza in 2014. The Wexner Foundation also paid former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak–himself accused of war crimes in connection with Israel’s 2009 Operation Cast Lead that killed over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza–$2.3 million for two studies, one of which he did not complete.

HKS’s Belfer Center has hosted Israeli generals, politicians, and other officials to give talks at Harvard Kennedy School. Ehud Barak, mentioned above, was himself a “Belfer fellow” at HKS in 2016. The Belfer Center also hosts crassly pro-Israel events for HKS students, such as: The Abraham Accords – A conversation on the historic normalization of relations between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel,” “A Discussion with Former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo,” “The Future of Modern Warfare” (which Belfer describes as “a lunch seminar with Yair Golan, former Deputy Chief of the General Staff for the Israel Defense Forces”), and “The Future of Israel’s National Security.”

As of 2022, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center is hosting former Israel military general and war criminal Amos Yadlin as a Senior Fellow at the Belfer’s Middle East Initiative. Furthermore, HKS is allowing Yadlin to lead a weekly study group of HKS students entitled “Israeli National Security in a Shifting Middle East: Historical and Strategic Perspectives for an Uncertain Future.” Harvard University students wrote an open letter demanding HKS “sever all association with Amos Yadlin and immediately suspend his study group.” Yadlin had defended Israel’s assassination policy through which the Israeli state has extrajudicially killed hundreds of Palestinians since 2000, writing that the “the laws and ethics of conventional war did not apply” vis-á-vis Palestinians under zionist occupation.

Harvard Kennedy School also plays host to the Harvard Kennedy School Israel Caucus. The HKS Israel Caucus coordinates “heavily subsidized” trips to Israel for 50 HKS students annually. According to HKS Israel Caucus’s website, students who attend these trips “meet the leading decision makers and influencers in Israeli politics, regional security and intelligence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [and] the next big Tech companies.” The HKS Israel Caucus also regularly hosts events which celebrate “Israel’s culture and history.” Like the trips to Israel they coordinate, HKS Israel Caucus events consistently whitewash over the reality of Israel’s colonial war against the Palestinian people through normalizing land theft, forced displacement, and resource theft.

Harvard Kennedy School also has numerous ties to local pro-Israel organizations: the ADL, the JCRC, and CJP.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Support for Saudi Arabia

In 2017, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center announced the launch of “The Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security,” which Belfer stated was “made possible through a gift from HRH Prince Turki bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.” Through this project, Harvard Kennedy School and the HKS Belfer Center have hosted numerous events at HKS which have promoted Saudi Arabia as a liberalizing and positive force for security and stability in the region, whitewashing over the realities of the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed campaign of airstrikes and blockade against Yemen which has precipitated conditions of mass starvation and an epidemic of cholera amongst the Yemeni people.

The Belfer Center’s Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security further normalizes and whitewashes Saudi Arabia’s crimes through its “HKS Student Delegation to Saudi Arabia.” This delegation brings 11 Harvard Kennedy School students annually on two-week trips to Saudi Arabia, where students “exchange research, engage in cultural dialogue, and witness the changes going on in the Kingdom firsthand.” Not unlike the student trips to Israel Harvard Kennedy School’s Israel Caucus coordinates, these trips to Saudi Arabia present HKS students with a crassly propagandized impression of Saudi Arabia, shoring up support for the “Kingdom” amongst the future leaders of the U.S. security state which HKS seeks to nurture.

THE MAPPING PROJECT’S Mission

The vast network outlined above between the Harvard Kennedy School, the U.S. federal government, the U.S. Armed Forces, and the U.S. weapons industry constitutes only a small portion of what is known about HKS and its role in U.S. imperialism, but it is enough.

The Mapping Project demonstrates that the Harvard Kennedy School of Government is a nexus of U.S. imperialist planning and cooperation, with an address. The Mapping Project also links HKS to harms locally, including, but not limited to colonialism, violence against migrants, ethnic cleansing/displacement of Black and Brown Boston area residents from their communities (“gentrification”), health harm, policing, the prison-industrial complex, zionism, and surveillance. The Harvard Kennedy School’s super-oppressor status – the sheer number of separate communities feeling its global impact in their daily lives through these multiple and various mechanisms of oppression and harm – as it turns out, is its greatest weakness.

A movement that can identify super-oppressors like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government can use this information to identify strategic vulnerabilities of key hubs of power and effectively organize different communities towards common purpose. This is what the Mapping Project aims to do–to move away from traditionally siloed work towards coordination across communities and struggles in order to build strategic oppositional community power.

Appendix: The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

• Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people

• Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people

• Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people

• Cambodia: 2-3 million people

• Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured

• Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)

• Colombia: 60,000 people

• Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)

• Croatia: 15,000 people

• Cuba: 1,800 people

• Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people

• East Timor: 200,000 people

• El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)

• Greece: More than 50,000 people

• Grenada: 277 people

• Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)

• Haiti: 100,000 people

• Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)

• Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people

• Iran: 262,000 people

• Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War

• Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people

• Korea: 5 million people

• Kosovo: 500 to 5,000

• Laos: 50,000 people

• Libya: at least 2500 people

• Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)

• Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)

• Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people

• Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence

• Panama: between 500 and 4000 people

• Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared

• Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people

• Somalia: at least 2,000 people

• Sudan: 2 million people

• Syria: at least 350,000 people

• Vietnam: 3 million people

• Yemen: over 377,000 people

• Yugoslavia: 107,000 people

Currency Crisis In The West (1965)

By Hsiang Chung

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Editor’s Note from BAR: This 1965 essay appeared in Kwame Nkrumah’s journal, The Spark. If it were around today, The Spark would probably carry a warning in the US that it was “state-affiliated media.” Its editors probably wouldn’t care. The Spark was published by Kwame Nkrumah’s Bureau of African Affairs and its explicit mission was to build socialism in Ghana and to aid in fomenting working-class revolution throughout Africa.

The Spark’s content reflected this mission. The weekly paper ran essays articulating the theory of Nkrumaism and published detailed analysis of neocolonialism and imperialism, and of socialism and development. It considered the class struggle in Africa and examined anti-colonial struggles across the continent. In its pages appeared statements of solidarity with Cuba, Algeria, and Black America, and contributions from Amilcar Cabral, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera. When W.E.B. Du Bois passed away in 1963, an issue appeared in his honor.

For the US State Department, The Spark represented a dangerous tendency within Nkrumah’s Ghana.  In January, 1964 the US Central Intelligence Agency issued a classified report titled “The Leftward Trend in Ghana .” The report noted that the US Embassy in Ghana had characterized a recent speech of Nkrumah’s “as perhaps his most extreme anticapitalist and revolutionary performance.” The speech, according to the CIA, “included [Nkrumah’s] first known specific use of such phrases as ‘class interests’ and ‘class politics,’” it criticized the US “as the citadel of reactionary opposition to progressive forces everywhere,” and it aligned Ghana with “the international ‘socialist’ fraternity.” “Subsequently,” the report continued, “[Nkrumah]  has increasingly tended to mouth the Communist-derived jargon appearing continually in The Spark.”

In their summary of the situation in Ghana, the CIA concluded that, “Barring a successful coup against his regime, it will probably be increasingly difficult for the West to maintain an effective presence in Ghana.”

Nkrumah was overthrown by a CIA-backed military on February 24, 1966.

Below we reprint an article from The Spark titled “Currency Crisis in the West.” Its author is Hsiang Chung, a Chinese economist of whom, we admit, we know little more than his name. Even so, the essay has a crystalline analysis of how monetary policy has been used as a tool of imperial and neocolonial rule. Moreover, in charting the historical reasons for the rise of the dollar’s global supremacy in the twentieth century, it establishes the historical conditions precipitating the dollar’s imminent twenty-first century fall. This is being republished for both historical perspective and relative analysis to the current state of the US dollar. It is important to note that much has changed since this was written in 1965, most notably the varying methods of imperialism/colonialism that have developed by the US and West, the fall of the USSR, and the abandoning the gold standard in 1971.

***

Hsiang Chung, “Currency Crisis in the West,” The Spark: A Socialist Weekly of the African Revolution, January 29, 1965.

The imperialist scramble for world domination is usually marked by a struggle for financial supremacy, for monetary policy is one of the heavy weapons of the imperialist countries in their drive, for expansion--a weapon they use to strangle their rivals and extend their spheres of influence.

In the struggle for monetary supremacy, an imperialist country invariably uses its political and economic power to establish a monetary bloc in which its own currency is made to take a leading position while the currencies of its colonies and dependencies as well as other states associated with it are reduced to a subordinate status.

It has to link to currencies of the monetary bloc members with its own, and at the same time to make them keep their gold and foreign exchange reserves in its central bank to be used by them for “unlimited buying and selling” on foreign exchange market at fixed rates. Consequently, its commodity in capital exports will not have to suffer from the fluctuation of the currency of the monetary bloc members and it will not have to pay more for raw material imports because of the devaluation of its own currency.

Moreover, since the gold and foreign exchange reserves of its monetary bloc members are deposited in its own central exploitation, and this leads to the formation of a financial centre within its own sphere of influence over which it is able to establish its financial supremacy. That is why currency warfare in capitalist international finance is an important means in the imperialist scramble for markets, outlets, for investment and sources for raw materials, as well as an indispensable factor in their constant redivision of the capital of this world.

The Monetary System Crisis Sharpened

The deepening of the general crisis of capitalism, especially the emergence of the crisis in the capitalist monetary system, has intensified the monetary warfare among the imperialist powers. As a result of the world economic crisis of 1929–33, normal financial relations among the capitalist countries were disrupted as never before; the gold standard completely collapsed, and the monetary system of the capitalist countries became chronically unstable.

From that time onwards, in their efforts to maintain currency stability, and to ward off the crisis in the monetary system, monopoly capitalist groups in the imperialist countries were compelled to resort to government intervention on a larger scale than before and adopt such measures in the field of international finance as  moratoria on foreign debts currency depreciation, foreign exchange  restrictions and control etc., in order to consolidate their position in the better struggle for markets and spheres of influence. However, all the steps, which were designed to shift the crisis onto others failed to extricate the imperialists from their plight, but instead made the struggle still sharper and more complicated.

Following the end of World War II, as a result of the formation of the socialist camp and the upsurge of the national liberation movement the areas dominated or exploited by the imperialist countries have become smaller and smaller. In this predicament, the inter-imperialist struggle for markets and spheres of influence has become more acute and currency has been used on a still larger scale as an instrument in defeating their adversaries. Not only have they subjected the currencies of their colonies and dependencies to their own as in the past; they have also exerted great efforts to make their own currency the dominant one within the shrinking imperialist camp. At the same time, the deepening of the general crisis of capitalism has been accomplished by an intensified crisis in the monetary system, and the imperialist countries have been forced to take further steps to intervene in various forms in the field of international finance. However, whenever they are taken by the strong to bully the weak or the weak to counteract an adversary’s pressure, the steps are bound to aggravate the imperialist monetary struggle, and make it more severe than was the case before World War II.

Domination vs Independence

The characteristic of postwar inter-imperialist relations is that US imperialism has increasingly endeavored to consolidate and extend its dominant position while the other imperialist powers refused to reconcile themselves to US control from which they have done all they can to free themselves. This rivalry between US imperialism and the other imperialist powers struggle between domination and independence— is also reflected in capitalist, world finance.

During World War II, US imperialism amassed enormous wealth and greatly expanded  its productive capacity and export trade. In the early post-war years, Washington took advantage of the temporary disappearances of three fascist countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan from the capitalist world arena of competition and of the heavy destruction suffered by the two old imperialist powers, Britain and France; it went all out for economic expansion abroad and consequently had a huge surplus in its balance of international payments and piled up vast gold reserves. In 1938 the US gold reserves amounted to $14,594 million or 56.1 per cent of the gold reserves of the capitalist world. In 1948, they jumped to $24,399 million, or 70.3 per cent of the capitalist world’s total. During this period, the other capitalist countries incurred huge deficits in their international accounts with the United States, resulting in a serious “dollar shortage” and massive gold outflows to the United States.

In the decade between 1938 and 1948, the gold reserves of Britain, the sterling area and the West European countries dropped from $9,511 million to $5,707 million, and their share of the capitalist world's gold reserves fell from 36.6 per cent to 16.4 per cent. At that time the disruption of domestic production, the heavy increases in budgetary deficits, and the impact of deficits in the payment of international payments brought about serious currency depreciation in most of the capitalist countries except the United States. Under the circumstances, the governments of these countries were constrained to their foreign exchange restrictions and controls to achieve, and to stabilize the value of their currencies by artificial means. The result was that they’re currencies became “soft”, i.e., could not be freely converted into other foreign currencies, they were in no position to compete with the dollar, a hard currency which was freely convertible.

Shift in Economic Power

This shift in economic power was much to the advantage of US imperialism in its greedy bid for world leadership. It has made every effort to form a big dollar bloc to dovetail plans to build an unprecedentedly big empire in the world. In addition to adopting political, military, economic and other measures, US imperialism, in order to fulfill this grandiose plan, must take the following steps in the monetary field. On the one hand, it needs to consolidate the external value of the dollar and maintain its “free convertibility” so that fixed exchange rate between the dollar and other currencies can be preserved, and the dollar can have the same status as gold in the capitalist world's current reserves.

This would provide favourable conditions for New York to become the capitalist world’s sole international financial centre.

On the other measures both at home, and in the currency blocs, they control in order to check economic penetration by their competitors. US imperialism therefore found it necessary to do the utmost to intervene in their international financial policies and foreign exchange systems, thus enabling it to maintain normal trade relations with them, and paying the way for its further economic expansion.

In effect, this US imperialist rapid plan is nothing but a refurnished version of the currency blocs established by Britain, France, and other old imperialist powers in their colonies and spheres of influence. But in order to ward off the strong opposition of other imperialists, the United States had to resort to more covert and slyer tactics in pushing forward this plan in the capitalist world.

Price of Gold Kept Down

In the first place, relying on its substantial gold reserves, US imperialism artificially kept down the price of gold in its dealings with other governments or their central banks. It is common knowledge that as early as 1934 the US government prescribed the external value of the dollar, i.e., the parity between the dollar and gold, at $35 an ounce. But since the latter part of the 1930s and particularly since World War II, the value of the dollar has been frequently devalued internally because of inflation. In 1948 the purchasing power of the dollar was only 57.8 per cent of what it was in 1939. In 1963 it further dropped to 44 per cent. In order to stabilize the external value of the dollar by artificial means, the U.S. government, irrespective of the frequent devaluation of the dollar internally, has always exchanged it for gold at the official rate of $35 percent ounce in its dealings with other countries. And so the external value of the dollar has long been out of tune with the extent of its internal devaluation while the price of gold has been greatly kept down.

Other capitalist countries were then suffering from a widespread “dollar shortage” and they virtually had very little or no dollars with which to buy US gold. Therefore, keeping the price of gold down actually meant compelling other capitalist countries to sell gold cheaply to the United States in order to make good their dollar deficits. This increased the surplus in the US balance of international payments, and gave it the opportunity to rake in gold at a low price made it difficult for the latter to relieve their “dollar shortage”. And this also became a pressure under which they had to accept the Marshall plan and other types of “aid,” and thus subject themselves to enslavement by US imperialism.

Another major aim of US imperialism in keeping down the price of gold is to irrigate the same role as gold to the dollar, whose external value was artificially stabilized, and serving as a world currency. Since the currencies of most other capitalist countries were unstable and their foreign exchange reserves, along with, and in preference to pound sterling. This facilitated US imperialism control of their currencies in one way or another, and it’s becoming the biggest International exploiter in capitalist world finance.

Washington’s Building Tactics

In the second place, in the early post-war years, Washington spread such false ideas as “the elimination of foreign exchange control,” “the stabilization of exchange rates,” and “avoidance of competitive currency depreciation.” These were designed to compel other countries to abandon their foreign exchange restrictions and controls, and relatively stabilize their exchange rates in a way advantageous to the United States. It pushed this policy in order to ensure that the proceeds of America commodity exports and the remittance to the United States of profits from overseas investment may be protected from other countries’ foreign exchange restrictions.

It is true that US imperialism, at least on the surface, has not imposed downright control over the currencies of its “allies.” In reality, however, it did all it could to achieve this purpose by bullying tactics and cajolement. As mentioned above, Washington compelled the recipients of its “aid“ to accept such terms as the introduction of free convertibility within a certain period of time and the scrapping of their foreign exchange controls and restrictions.

A notable example of this took place when Britain received a big US loan amounting to $3,750 million in 1945 and two years later was compelled to introduce free convertibility for the pound sterling, which lasted for only five weeks. Of great importance is the fact that the International Monetary Fund set up in the early postwar years— a major instrument of US imperialism in the international monetary field— dangled the bait of short term loans before member states in order to induce them to accept conditions involving the loss of national sovereignty. These included the abolition of foreign exchange, controls and restrictions, the definition of the foreign exchange value of a currency in terms of the dollar containing a specific weight of gold and the obligation to obtain the funds agreement to specific changes in foreign exchange rates.

Struggle Between Dollar and Pound

All these measures were naturally resented by other imperialist powers. However, West Germany and Japan were then dominated by Washington, and it was on the basis of formulas prepared by the US government that the exchange rates for the West German mark and the Japanese yen were established. Inflation of considerably serious proportions and a rapid deterioration in the balance of international payments overtook France and Italy; the franc and the lira were frequently devalued; it was difficult for them to compete with the dollar. Only the pound sterling could initiate limited counter- offensives against it. Although Britain’s power has declined since World War II, it still has the backing of the sterling area in international finance, the pound remains the reserve currency of sterling area countries and a number of other capitalist countries in the world network of overseas banks, which was set up by Britain in the last century, retains considerable influence. In these circumstances, the struggle between the dollar and the pound was naturally the most prominent one in the imperialist currency warfare.

The comprehensive system of foreign exchange restrictions and control set up by Britain in the sterling area was a powerful fulcrum strengthening British imperialist exploitation of the commonwealth countries and checking US economic penetration. And it was a serious handicap to US imperialist expansion in the capitalist world.

In the first few years since World War II, by means of loans, “aid” and pressure by different US controlled international organizations, Washington devised every possible means to compel Britain to open the door to the sterling area, and restore the free convertibility of the pound so as to pave the way for the control of the whole sterling area, including Britain itself. For a time British imperialism refused to take orders from Washington and adopted delaying tactics. But in 1949 a pound was devalued by 30.5 per cent against the dollar, followed by a corresponding currency to valuation by 35 other capitalist countries–to a large extent the result of pressure from Washington.

Nevertheless, Britain and other imperialist powers, wherever possible, dealt Washington’s high-handed policy, a rebuff. The sterling area and the currency blocs of other imperialist countries—such as the franc bloc—clung stubbornly to their spheres of influence. Moreover, on the question of the price of gold, because gold produced in the sterling area makes up more than 70 per cent of the total annual production of the capitalist world, Britain and South Africa have more than once battled for a rise in the gold price as a countermeasure to US control. They eventually succeeded in wrestling some concessions from Washington and were permitted to sell their gold for industrial purposes on the free market at a higher price than the official US price of $35 per ounce. The International Monetary Fund's demand for the abolition of foreign exchange controls, and for the institution of a fixed parity between the dollar and other currencies were ignored by many countries. France and Italy, for instance, did not institute fixed exchange rates until the mid-1950s. This shows that, despite Washington’s desperate efforts to put the capitalist world's monetary system under its control, other imperialist powers have been unwilling to accept permanent subordination, they have exerted every effort to free themselves from the claws of the dollar. With the shift in the balance of forces between the United States and other imperialist powers, both Washington’s efforts at domination in the monetary field, and the other imperialist’s resistance are growing more intense.

No More Dollar Dominance

With the advent of the 1950s and the aggravation of the uneven development of capitalism, new changes have taken place in the balance of forces among the imperialist countries. Propped up by the United States, West Germany, Italy, and Japan, have recovered from their position as defeated countries. The power of France has steadily increased, enabling it gradually to speak on equal terms with the United States. Although it keeps getting weaker, Britain too has no desire to be at the mercy of Washington. US dominance, which was attained during and immediately after World War II, has begun to falter.  

This shift in the balance of forces which is unfavorable to US imperialism is also reflected in international finance. After the war of aggression against Korea broke out in 1950, deficits began to appear in the US balance of payments and outflow of gold started, because its policies of war and aggression made it increasingly difficult for its trade surplus and proceeds from overseas investment to meet its huge military expenditures, foreign “aid” commitments and private capital export.

A similar situation recurred during US economic crisis of 1953–54. After 1956, taking advantage of the Anglo-French aggression against Egypt, the United States sold a large amount of oil and cotton to Western Europe, and this helped to bring about a turn for the better in the US balance of payments. However, from 1950 to 1957, the US gold flow to other countries amounted to $1,700 million. Added to this were mounting short term debts, and the annual rate of deficit in its balance of payments averaged about $1,200 million. During the same period the gold reserves of other capitalist countries increased by $3,700 million and their dollar reserves by $6,400 million. By the 1950s, the widespread “dollar shortage” of the early posts were years had virtually become a thing of the past.

A New State

After 1958, a new state was reached in the struggle between the United States and other imperialist powers to strengthen their respective positions in world finance. On the one hand, as a result of its intensified policies of war and aggression, US imperialism had to spend on an average more than $10,000 million a year for its overseas military expenditures, foreign “aid” and private capital export. This led to an increase in the serious dollar crisis, which was manifested in the form of balance of payment deficits, and of gold outflows. The dollar crisis and the recurrent economic crisis erupted either simultaneously or alternately.

Whatever methods it uses, it is impossible for US imperialism to prevent a continual deterioration in the position of the dollar. On the other hand, with the rapid growth in their political and economic power, the tremendous improvement in the balance of payment, and the big increase in their gold reserves, other major capitalist countries, and particularly several of the Common Market Six with France and West Germany as their nucleus, were able greatly to strengthen their currencies on the international finance market. From 1958 to 1962 the gold flowing from the United States to other countries totaled $6,800 million. These rises in the short term debts owed to other countries made for an average annual rate of deficits of about $3,000 million from 1950 to 1957. At the same time, the increase in the gold reserves of other capitalist countries amounted to $8,700 million. If increases in foreign exchange holdings are added to this the total increase in their gold and foreign exchange reserves during the period was $14,500 million. Most of these increases went to West European countries. France’s increases amounted to $3,400 million, Italy’s $2,200 million, and West Germany’s $1700 million. Next came Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Dollar Crisis— Incurable Disease

By 1963, the incurable disease of the dollar crisis remained serious. The deficit in the US balance of payments in that year still stood at $3,000 million. At the end of December, its gold and foreign exchange reserves totaled $32,179 million, of which gold accounted for $19,790.million, or 47% of the capitalist world's total. Thus US gold reserves are far below their pre-war level while those of the West European countries are far above it.

Decolonisation Is A Material Struggle

[Pictured: Frantz Fanon is one of the most articulate thinkers on anti-colonial liberation movements, colonial and post-colonial studies.]

By Alieu Bah

Republished from This Is Africa.

Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. . .”

—Amilcar Cabral

Decolonisation is not a theoretically eloquent dance to nowhere. It’s the awakening of a sleeping people taking over the means of production. It  is the material struggle of the last becoming the first, qualitatively supplanting the ideologies of the ruling class with the revolutionary ideas and cultures they have developed during the great showdown between the people’s army and the minions of private property. Decolonisation is the fire and fury unleashed unto the world in a historical encounter that is inevitable in this epoch of neocolonialism and capitalism-imperialism – and with this, an inauguration of another way of being.

At this point we must clarify that we do have a philosophical component to this fight. A war of world-views and of the class, race and gender elements whose reactionary hegemonies in the life of the mind must be challenged with progressive ideas and theories to win the material struggle. Our only clamour is that to philosophise  without  changing the materiality of social life will give no credence, no power, no reality to these progressive values and world-views we today are busy talking, writing and theorising about. We must learn the art of merging theory and practice within the organised masses of our people to win the ideological war at hand in this long protracted struggle. That in a nutshell is the thesis of this essay. Let’s move on, then, and hold this conversation.

Land, bread, and water – not a complex intellectual discourse on the ontologies and epistemologies of colonialism and its antithesis – are the deepest interest of the masses. Our people are today clamouring and hungered in the billions by the constant extraction and oppression of corporations, and as such, are caught either in the whirlwind of a vicious cycle of wage slavery or in the labour reserves of big capital. For a mass like that, it would be disingenuous to come with a decolonial program that is not rooted in qualitatively changing the objective material conditions. It would be basically fighting a futile battle against ideas and ideologies that are informed ever deeply by the superstructure that owes its lifeblood to the ever-thriving exploitative economic base that sucks the life, blood, and depths of the third world soils. That’s to say, if the program isn’t materialist and practice-base, it’s more useless than a toothless, clawless, caged lion.

To thin the mist of history a bit, let’s remember that when the righteous masses of the colonised Global South were being rallied in the anti-colonial struggles of yesteryears, the revolutionary leaders didn’t expose them to a program of fighting against mere racist ideas. They didn’t come with a complex decolonial philosophical program and neither did they busy themselves with the frivolous endeavours of competing in speaking and writing a language the masses will never understand nor decipher. They came with a simple program and named the enemy. The program was, let’s win self-determination so we shall no more live under the shadow of another human being as subservient economic and political slaves. That our enemy today is the coloniser and he must be booted out by any means necessary. And our people understood that. They yielded whatever little weapons they had, and as they sharpened their machetes, their determination to become an independent people who would win a glorious fight so their conditions are bettered permanently knew no bounds.

Kwame Nkrumah (pictured on a Soviet postage stamp) was a Ghanaian politician and coined the term “neocolonialism”. Photo credit: by Mariluna. Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository.

The decolonial program then must today be based on where we are today. What contradictions are inherent within our nations and people. It must be class conscious. It must be materialist. It can wear a dashiki and glorify ancient Egypt, but it still must be dialectical. It must invest in winning over the productive forces of our people in an organised fashion to reclaim what rightfully belongs to them and walk the long road to the progress and happiness of all of humankind. It must study yesterday, but not get caught in it. It mustn’t be romantic. It must waste no time in endless masturbatory insults on classic colonialism, but to study objectively the gains made in the liberation struggles, and use those facts in fighting to win against neocolonialism and the comprador class that has risen from amongst us. It must be a mass-based program whose focus is the creation of a people’s popular history that is classless and communist; anything less than this is but a waste of time and an attempt at marching into a dead end. Because great ideas that have no bearing in changing the conditions of the people are just that: great ideas – nothing else.

Decolonisation is about land. Therefore, our nationalism is righteous, whether it be the nationalism of the indigenous of the Americas, the peoples of Africa, or the aborigines of Australia. It’s about winning the land back and building independent societies from the ravages of settlers to the adventures abroad of big money. Today the masses are calling for expropriation of land without compensation as part of an active decolonial program, because without land, everything else fades into thin air whiles the starvation, the sickness, the clamour, and the squalor spiral ever on in the shantytowns, slums and favelas. Decolonisation is winning the land to honour the resolve of our ancestors yesterday and descendants who will survive the beautiful tomorrows yet to come. To this vein we stand today with the fighting people of occupied lands from Azania to Palestine in their righteous struggle for their lands.

Decolonisation isn’t woke, it’s a nightmare.

It’s a messy, habitual, continuous nightmare that plagues both coloniser and colonised in the suburbs and shantytowns. Because the coloniser and colonised are old friends, they have become synced in their anticipations of the dreadful end. An antithesis whose contradiction will only be resolved in the burning-down-to-the-ground of the master’s house. The happiness of the coloniser is the wretched state of the colonised, and vice versa. Theirs is a dialectical relationship that can never be woke, since the day it wakes up it will result in the eternal sleep of the benefactor. So the work today is to awaken the beast within the neocolonial peripheries and remind it of the ending of the friendship. That it won’t be transformed into a complaining Philosophy or a harmless aesthetic, but a program of action whose basis is righteous indignation at the forces of oppression that have stolen the land underneath their feet. For the day the third world wakes up, the first world goes to an eternal sleep filled with the nightmares of the afore time colonised – again, the dialectic, but overturned, this time, to serve the ones that rightfully deserve it.

Decolonisation, then, is to organise for socialist revolution. It’s not academic conferences and coffeehouse bullshit. It is scientific in its analysis and materialist in its theory. It doesn’t beg to be heard in ivory towers, because it’s catching fire in the working class and peasants quarters of the Global South. It is calculated in its advance and its highest development is found in the proletarian and peasant movement that denounces the labor aristocrats of the colonial metropole as it marches forward in seizing production and changing the tide of consumption. Knowing it has nothing to lose but its shackles and in winning worlds it will bring forth the historically-needed economic, social, cultural, political destiny of the world to a radiant beginning(s). It’s the great poetry in motion of a people finally taking ownership of their own dance as they walk into a newness hitherto unseen by the reactionary forces of a decadent world; a reality of their own making, becoming and being in a zeitgeist that’s made through fire, hail, and brimstone.

To conclude, our decolonisation today must sit and converse with the people in a language they understand. It’s a striving at naming and knowing the enemy and the friend of the colonised. It must know that we will never mentally decolonise without winning over the economic base and replacing the ideologies of the bourgeois superstructure with that of the progressive masses. It’s primary insofar as land, bread, and water remain the province of the private. It’s popular, messy, beautiful, poetic, bloody, and in the end, worthy of the final becoming of humankind in its continuous motion and movement to happiness and progress as it enters the vortex of the very eternal.

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Elon Musk, Twitter, and the Power of Ownership

[Musk family wealth came from property ownership throughout Africa, including Apartheid South Africa and Zambia, where Errol Musk owned an emerald mine like the one pictured above]

By Carl Beijer

Republished from the author’s blog.

Last month, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and immediately disbanded its entire board of directors. This may have surprised you if you get your ideas about power from the populist right, who have been telling us that “power has passed from individual bourgeois business to a new ruling class” — the so-called “managerial elite.” Evidently, their “cultural power” with its full arsenal of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” couldn’t do a damn thing to save them in the end.

Even their enormous incomes couldn’t help them! These are no blue collar workers; these are multi-millionaires with astronomical salaries. “Heterodox economists” like Lévy and Duménil tell us that capitalism is over and we now live in the age of “managerialism”, in which “the main social split is nowadays between lower and higher wage earners, and increasingly so in conformity with the rise of managers”; but Musk had no problem whatsoever kicking some of the highest paid managers in the world to the curb.

Capitalist discourse loves to dismiss Marxist economics as a kind of obscurantist and contrarian analysis that no sensible person could possibly take seriously, but look at how everyone is talking about Musk right now and it’s obvious that we all know exactly what happened. He won because he took ownership of Twitter. That is what allowed him to crush the assembled power of the professional managerial class — Twitter’s corporate governance structure, the complex of NGO professionals and celebrities and academics who protested his takeover, all of it — on a whim. Taking ownership was his coronation, and the moment it happened everyone knew that his opponents would never prevail.

If you take one lesson from the Musk takeover, it should be this: capitalists can do this whenever they want. And even the highest-level managers and corporate executives know it, which means that they can only either defer to ownership or risk getting fired. This is a point I spelled out a few months ago when former WWE CEO Vince McMahon resigned:

Whether or not he has plans to exercise that power [majority ownership of the the WWE] is beside the point; at any given moment, shareholder Vince can decide to appoint a new board that will re-appoint him as CEO. And the very possibility that he could do this gives him the exact same power over management that shareholders have when Vince pleads that he only fired wrestlers because he’s a publicly traded company.

Private ownership confers a unique form of power unlike anything else in our politics. It matters more than professional titles, than academic degrees, than cultural norms and values, than the power of free speech and public reason. Even the state’s victory against it isn’t assured. And there is no form of power concentrated in fewer hands.

Nor is there any form of power that we meet with less skepticism. If you don’t believe me, just pay attention to how we talk about Musk’s power-play moving forward. You’re going to see a lot of talk about how Musk is a bad apple, one of those dreaded right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires. You’re going to hear about the rising tide of fascism, driven by vague hatreds of egalitarianism and freedom. You’re even going to hear some talk about “corporate” power, as if Twitter’s board would still be in control if it were structured slightly differently. But what you won’t hear is skepticism of the basic legal, political, and economic institution — private property — that actually keeps Musk in control.

What is Nkrumahism-Touréism?

By All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP)

Republished from Hood Communist.

The Africa which exists today, as well as the one we are struggling to build, is not the old Africa but a new emergent revolutionary society; a classless society in which a new harmony, a new cohesiveness, a new revolutionary African personality and a new dignity is forged out of the traditional African way of life which has been permanently changed by thousands of years of Euro-Christian and Islamic intrusions and by the historical development of the competing and conflicting slave, feudal, capitalistic and newly emergent socialist modes of production. A new emergent ideology is therefore required. That ideology is Nkrumahism-Touréism!

Nkrumahism-Touréism takes its name from the consistent, revolutionary, socialist and Pan-African principles, practices and policies followed, implemented and taught by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Seku Touré; two of the foremost proponents and practitioners of the scientific strategy to liberate and unify Africa under scientific socialism. These principles, practices and policies are recorded in their speeches, writings, actions, achievements and life. In a larger and more complete sense, Nkrumahism-Touréism is the synthesis of the accumulated practical and theoretical contributions and achievements of centuries and generations of mass, revolutionary Pan-African and larger socialist struggles. Nkrumahism-Touréism is the application of the universal laws of revolutionary growth and development of the particular conditions of Africa and her children. Its concrete living manifestation is to be found in the creative contributions of the present day African Revolution.

Nkrumahism-Touréism provides the masses of African People with a program of human transformation turning individual defects into qualities by living the ideology. It is a Pan-African ideology that breaks the web of complexes put on us by the dominant culture and enables us to reclaim our humanity, reassert our dignity, and develop a new Revolutionary African Personality. It provides a revolutionary view of Africa and the world applying the universal principles of scientific socialism in the context of African history, tradition, and aspirations. It gives us a set of analytical tools which enable the masses of Africa People to correctly interpret, understand, redeem African culture and reconstruct Africa by way of the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumahism-Touréism provides a complete social, political, philosophical and economic theory which constitute a comprehensive network of principles, beliefs, values, morals and rules which guide our behavior, determines the form which our institutions and organizations will take; and acts as a cohesive force to bind us together, guide and channel our revolutionary action towards the achievement of Pan-Africanism and the inevitable triumph of socialism worldwide. Nkrumahism-Touréism includes the following principles:

The Primacy and Unity of Africa

The concept of the primacy and unity of Africa has its origins in the emergence of the modern Pan African movement which was characterized by our Peoples resistance to foreign domination in the 15th century. This foreign domination was soon followed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and full blown colonialism which culminated in the European partition of Africa agreed upon by the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885. The primacy of Africa dictates that we reject these artificially imposed colonial borders. A united Africa, the concept of continental African unity is the source of our strength and the key to our liberation. As Nkrumah says:

“African Unity gives an indispensable continental dimension to the concept of the African nation…Unity is the first prerequisite for destroying neo-colonialism. Primary and basic is the need for a union government on the much divided continent of Africa.” (Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism p.253) We cannot accept any other version of our land, to define Africa as anything less than the entire continent including its islands is to accept the neo-colonial strategy to divide and conquer. The primacy of Africa also speaks to our primary identity as African people. We are African. Rather than promoting our micro-national identities such as Nigerian, Ivorian, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Brazilian, African-American, etc. we must focus on the common denominator which is African. For us as Africans and Pan-Africanists as Nkrumah says, “the core of the black revolution is in Africa and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the black man throughout the world lacks a national home… All people of African decent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.” (Nkrumah, K Class Struggle in Africa)

The Integrity Of The Revolutionary African Personality

The African personality is the product of the evolution of African people’s conception of the world, way of life, their ethics and moral principles which are a particular reflection of African culture. This African cultural personality has been under attack by capitalism /colonialism and its extension neo-colonialism which have developed in diverse and sometimes subtle ways a moral, intellectual, and cultural superiority complex towards us as an oppressed people. Sekou Touré says, ”the science of depersonalizing the colonized people is sometimes so subtle in its methods that it progressively succeeds in falsifying our natural psychic behavior and devaluing our own original virtues and qualities with a view to our assimilation”. (Touré A. S.The Political Leader Considered As The Representative Of A Culture p.3) We are clear that the assertion of the cultural personality of an oppressed culture becomes the catalyst for its national liberation movement. Nkrumah and Touré both call for the revival and integrity of the African personality, it is this re-personalization, which constitutes the successful affirmation of the cultural personality of the oppressed culture. Re-personalization for Africans means re-Africanisation to be accomplished through the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumah says that the revolutionary African personality “expresses identification not only with Africa’s historical past, but with the struggle of the African people in the African Revolution to liberate and unify the continent and to build a just society.”(Nkrumah,K Revolutionary Path p 206). The Revolutionary African Personality is a pan-Africanist concept which identifies us not by our language, religion or geographical location but in terms of our goals which are dynamic, just and noble. Thus, the Revolutionary African Personality puts emphasis on our ideological identity over anything else. It is this ideological identity for which we must consistently struggle which can only be ultimately realized through the success of the Cultural Revolution.

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism are the cluster of humanist principles which underlie traditional African society and define the African personality. Respect for human beings and social solidarity, coupled with a keen sense of fraternity, justice and cooperation between men and women are the very foundation of traditional African society.

However, Sekou Touré adds to this that “ society has been marked by the existence of two natures of life, two natures transposing themselves in thought, action, behavior and in the options of (wo)men, whether political, economic, social or cultural. In other words there are two human natures in mankind and in each People; we have the People [interests] itself and the anti-People [interests], with a permanent struggle being waged between the two, the class struggle.”…(Touré A.S. Women In Society p26)

The imperialist incursion into Africa has exacerbated these contradictions, and the battle against the anti-people’s class has dictated that we incorporate in addition to our class analysis the national and gender aspects of the struggle to include the full scope of our Pan African reality. Our ideology teaches us that the first principle of the Revolution is that everything we have earned in life is a reflection of the struggles and contributions of the People and that the masses of People are the makers of history. Included in this principle is the understanding that (wo)man is not merely treated as a means to an end but also as an end in themselves. This is the revolutionary operational principle that forms the basis for the egalitarian, humanist and collectivist character of our ideology.

In fact the (dialectical) relationship between (wo)man and the People shows that the Peoples interests are (wo)man’s interest because it is the People that generate (wo)man. Further more the value and level of the historical evolution of a People is faithfully measured by the condition of the women in society.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

Revolutionaries want Revolution because it means a qualitative change in the oppressive conditions of the status- quo of capitalist society. In order to bring about this change, revolutionaries must study the science of Revolution. Dialectical and historical materialism is the essence of revolutionary science. Through the study and application of revolutionary ideology, which includes the scientific laws of dialectical and historical materialism, revolutionaries are able to understand the most general laws of the development of nature, human society, and thinking. It is therefore an indispensable instrument of scientific analysis and revolutionary transformation of the world. Sekou Touré says dialectical materialism “studies the general connections between the elements of nature, the laws of evolution of the objective world and the action that these laws exercise on human consciousness.”.(Touré, A.S.Strategy and Tactics of the Revolution, 52) “Dialectics is the method of scientific analysis which all [people] Christians, Muslims and atheist alike can use. Historical materialism is scientific. It objectively proves the rule of historical evolution from the production system. The changes society experienced, the succession of different regimes from the primitive community to socialism can scientifically be explained by historical materialism. Here dialectics deals with the method of analysis and explanation of facts of social and historical phenomena. Historical materialism made it possible to enlighten the process of changes recorded in every man’s life and characterized by the existence of production systems with properties and features different from one another.”(Touré, A.S. Africa On The Move vol xxiv chapterVI,Revolution and Religion p185) 

Historical materialism is the dialectical method applied to history. Historical materialism analyzes and explains the historical processes of evolutionary and revolutionary changes in society characterized by the changes in production systems with properties and features which differ from one to another. Historical materialism does not list the stages of the evolution of society, it analyzes society to show the specific origin of every stage of it’ s evolution, how every qualitative change originates and the specific characteristics of every stage.

The Harmony between Religion/Spirituality and Revolution

For Nkrumahism-Touréism, a revolutionary ideology coming from African culture there is and cannot be any contradiction between Revolution and Religion. In fact Revolution and Religion/spirituality are in harmony and are complementary aspects of culture. Religion and spirituality are dominant features of the African Personality. Nkrumah points out that “The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity and value” ( Nkrumah,K. Consciencism p68).

For African people there is essential harmony in our faith in the Creator and the African Revolution. To fulfill our obligations to our religion or spirituality we have an obligation to properly serve one another, Gods’ highest creation. Man and Woman, the true servants of God and the People, have the duty to fight for the liberation of those deprived of liberty, whether an individual or a People.

Revolution is the collective action and struggle of an oppressed People guided and supported by a consciously planned process (ideology) and determination to qualitatively change an old, backward and oppressive political-economic condition (capitalism), into a new progressive and just system that will work for the People’s interests (Socialism).

Religion is a set of beliefs and principles that affirm the existence of one or more supreme beings or God(s) which govern us all. Religion influences and motivates social behavior in the sense that it serves as a moral guide and provides reassurance to People that in spite of what may seem to be an overwhelmingly negative situation, through the practice of religion and serving God, peace, justice and prosperity will prevail. Religion holds respect for human dignity and human virtue. Religion can also project man’s existence onto the next world, and reserves for a future world positive or negative existence according to their life conduct in this world. However as Sekou Touré, a revolutionary who practices Islam,  points out “The Revolution does not intend to deny this future world; it only wishes that the struggle against evil be not `deferred` or postponed, and this is actually what all sincere believers and the dispossessed, regardless of race, sex or nationality are pressing for.” (A. S. Touré, Revolution and Religion, Africa On The Move volxxiv).

Both Revolution and Religion share common values which they want people to reflect, and even more they want People to become the uncompromising and faithful advocates of. Some of these values are justice, peace and freedom for mankind, the nation and the laboring masses. Revolution and Religion proclaim, organize and conduct a permanent struggle, a universal struggle which, for the former is class struggle, the clash between antagonistic interests represented by classes that are opposed in the process of production, distribution and utilization of goods. While for the latter it is a struggle between good and evil, good embodying truth, justice and beauty, and evil embodying exploitation, lies, oppression, in essence all that is contrary to good.

Suffering, sweat and sacrifice are considered by both Revolution and Religion as necessary and ongoing on the long road to freedom. An important part of Religion and Revolution involves the unity of the philosophy and the behavior it advocates. In other words, not only is there is a constant struggle for the honest adherents of both Revolution and Religion to live up to the principles of each, but both Revolution and Religion have also been misused by corrupt men and women as a tool of exploitation and oppression.

Hence we should judge Revolution and Religion primarily by its principles not necessarily by its adherents. We know that our People’s faith and belief in righteousness and justice, which is upheld by their religious and spiritual faith must reinforce the need to engage in revolutionary political activity to defeat the enemies of God and the People on earth. The essential harmony of Revolution and Religion can only be affirmed in the struggle to build a just society.

The Necessity For Permanent, Mass, Revolutionary, Pan-African Political Education, Organization and Action

Following the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945, the mass political party emerged within the mass political movements as a qualitative leap and superior form of organized mass struggle, although mass political movement remained the dominant form of struggle. Some of these political movements can and do topple neo-colonialism, as most puppet regimes are weak. But generally speaking only mass-based revolutionary parties unified by a monolithic ideology will be strong enough to seize and sustain state power when confronted with imperialism’s counter-offensive of political, economic, military and psychological terrorism. Only mass-based parties with revolutionary ideology will maintain class struggle as a strategic principle and properly organize the class struggle along clear-cut class lines to defeat the internal and external enemies of the People’s class. Only ideological monolithic mass parties of conscious cadre are capable of organizing socialist transformation. 

A dialectical relationship exists between mass political movements and mass revolutionary parties. Revolutionary mass parties are a product of mass political movements. The mass movements remain relentless in struggle against oppression and for a better way of life. They serve as a source of sustenance and bulwark of defense for revolutionary party building. The wider mass movements stand as an inexhaustible reservoir of revolutionary mass potential, which ultimately must be tapped to realize our mass party. Revolutionary party building is integrally connected with and seeks to be a catalytic force with respect to ideologically transforming the broader mass movements into one revolutionary mass Pan-African party. Through ideological education and struggle, the Party seeks to progressively raise the level of class-consciousness. This transformation largely depends on acquiring the special Competence of ideologically recruiting and training cadre on a mass scale.

Revolutionary Ideology as The Greatest Asset

Nkrumahism-Touréism puts emphasis on the fact that the fundamental task facing Africa is the ideological transformation of man and woman. This transformation begins in the realm of morals and values:

“Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest, informed man [and woman] who submerges self in service to the nation and mankind. A man [and woman] who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of man [and woman] whose humility is his [her] strength and whose integrity is his [her] greatness.” (Nkrumah,K. 1975 Africa Must Unite p.130).

Both Nkrumah and Touré held ideology as the crucial element and the greatest asset in the African revolution. Touré teaches us that “Culture is the framework of ideology. Culture is the container, which carries ideology as its contents.” Africa has her own culture and thus must have her own ideology thereby conforming to the African personality. Nkrumah informs us that philosophy is an instrument of ideology and must derive it’s weapons from the living conditions of African people and that it is from those conditions that the intellectual content of our philosophy must be created. Nkrumah teaches us further that…. “a united people armed with an ideology which explains the status quo and illuminates our path of development is the greatest asset we posses for the total liberation and complete emancipation of Africa. And the emancipation of Africa completes the process of the emancipation of man.” (Nkrumah, K. 1964 Why The Spark p.2).

Touré echoes Nkrumah’s position that political freedom is a prerequisite for economic freedom and adds that political revolution is part and parcel of the ideological revolution. Hence ideological revolution is the fundamental requirement for political and economic revolutions. Likewise, political independence is incomplete unless it is followed by an economic revolution. Touré shows revolutionary ideology as the critical element in developing revolutionary consciousness as he teaches us the laws of developing consciousness. When he says,

“ Without revolutionary consciousness there is no Revolution! All those who have had to conduct revolution have been able to verify this. But where does this revolutionary consciousness come from, since it is certain that it is not basic datum, nor does it come into being and develop spontaneously? History teaches that it is created and developed through ideological education and revolutionary practice. We can equally affirm that without ideological training and without revolutionary action, there can be no revolutionary consciousness.”

Sekou Touré

To achieve a decisive impact on or recruit from mass movements the Party must have ideologically strong cadre and a program of ideological development. With the mass party our masses can bring forth and strengthen the best attributes of the mass movement into the qualified expressions of the mass revolutionary party characterized by mass revolutionary consciousness and mass ideological power as the guiding force to revolutionary practice.

The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) is a permanent, independent, revolutionary, socialist, Pan-African Political Party based in Africa. Africa is the just homeland of African People all over the world. Our Party is an integral part of the Pan-African and World Socialist revolutionary movement. The A-APRP understands that “all people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any other part of the world, are Africans and belong to the African Nation”. — (Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, page 4)

Walter Rodney: A People's Professor

By Curry Malott and Elgin Bailey

Republished from Liberation School.

In a recent book on the ongoing relevance of Walter Rodney’s work, Karim F. Hirji notes that, “as with scores of progressive intellectuals and activists of the past, the prevailing ideology functions to relegate Rodney into the deepest, almost unreachable, ravines of memory. A person who was widely known is now a nonentity, a stranger to the youth in Africa and the Caribbean” and the U.S. [1]. Rodney’s theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist movement warrant an ongoing engagement with his life story and major texts.

Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript.

This essay, which complements our new study guide on The Russian Revolution, offers a brief overview of Rodney’s background historical context. Highlighting aspects of Rodney’s individual life demonstrates that his commitments were not just the result of his own individual experiences and conclusions, but were part of and emerged from the revolutionary crisis ripping through the world at the time. To better comprehend A View from the Third World, we turn to Groundings with My Brothers, which Rodney produced as a relatively new professor in Jamaica. In that book, Rodney reflects on the dialectical pedagogy he developed to make his academic labor part of the global movement against capitalist imperialism, which he also called the white power structure [2].

What is clear throughout Rodney’s work is the influence of the materialist insight that, while people make history, they cannot make it as they please, but it in the context of existing material conditions. Rather than start with abstract slogans or formulas, Rodney’s place of departure is an assessment of concrete conditions. For example, Rodney begins Groundings with a political assessment of the situation in Jamaica and he begins A View from the Third World with his analysis of the historical situation that gave way to Russia’s revolutionary era.

Raised in struggle

Walter Rodney was born March 23, 1942 into a working-class Guyanese family. According to Walter’s partner, Dr. Patricia Rodney, his parents introduced him to community activism at an early age. Growing up in Guyana in the 1950s, when the socialist movement was influential, “sociopolitical engagement was not uncommon among Guyanese youth” [3]. This was an incredibly exciting era to be a part of. It was a time of qualitative changes as the people of Guyana set out to build a whole new social and political system. “Walter and I, and our peers,” Patricia writes, “were strongly influenced by the political climate and the infectious spirit for independence that called and moved Guyanese of all generations to action” [4].

In contemporary U.S. society—a society that has been gripped by a deep reactionary counter-revolutionary force in response to the era of Walter Rodney’s generation—critical education tends to be viewed as something that can assist students in developing a critical consciousness. During the era that preceded the current one, when the colonized and oppressed world was in rebellion against colonialism and imperialist capitalism, it was the people, as Patricia Rodney alludes to above, who brought revolutionary commitments to education, not the other way around.

Walter Rodney was therefore one of countless students who took a sense of possibility with him to Queens College in Guyana. While at Queens College, Rodney became president of the historical society and deepened his interest in activism. In 1960, he won an Open Arts scholarship to the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Patricia notes that “it was as a student in Jamaica that Walter first felt the disconnect between his life on campus and the grassroots community that surrounded the university” [5]. Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, earning a doctorate in history in 1966 at the age of 24.

While in London Rodney deepened his political commitments through a deep study of Marxism with a group of Caribbean students who would meet at the home of C. L. R. James on Friday evenings for hours on end.

Becoming a people’s history professor

Rodney accepted his first teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1966, but only stayed a year. However, Rodney would return to Tanzania for five years in 1969. Vijay Prashad says that Tanzania at the time was at the “highpoint” of its “experiment with self-reliance and non-alignment, which was then called ‘African socialism’” [6].

Shortly after beginning teaching in Tanzania, “the radical students from across the region formed the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front” as a response to Tanzania’s president Dr. Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration of 1967, which called for a more direct move to socialism [7]. Nyerere was the leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), one of the post-WWII independence movements under British-controlled Tanganyika. Support for TANU grew and by 1960 the first elections were planned for the East African country. On December 9, 1961, Tanganyika became an independent republic and changed its name to Tanzania. In 1969, C. L. R. James concluded that, as a result of these developments, Tanzania stood “as one of the foremost political phenomena of the twentieth century” [8].

James specifically points to Nyerere’s focus on rethinking secondary and higher education as Tanzania’s “most revolutionary change of all…in order to fit the children and youth…for the new society which the government…seeks to build” [9]. Many of the students from across the continent Rodney encountered at the University of Dar es Salaam brought transformative, revolutionary determination, optimism, and organizational capacities with them. As a product himself of this revolutionary era, Rodney was well positioned to not just learn from, but contribute to, the radical student movement.

In 1967, Rodney was offered a position as a history professor in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where his contributions flourished. As a professor in Jamaica, Rodney was “torn by the lack of connection between academia and the working class” and having “a strong desire to bridge these worlds” [10]. It is fitting then that “unlike other professors at UWI, he chose to live with his young family outside the insular university compound housing” [11]. Rodney continued to use his position as a university professor to untether his academic labor (e.g., writing and teaching) from the white power structure of bourgeois state forces to contribute to the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Refusing to put the narrow self-interest of his academic position before the broader interests of the working class, Rodney’s commitment to revolution represents not only a recurring theme throughout his work (including A View from the Third World) but of the broader liberatory atmosphere of the times.

Rodney developed a practice for bridging the gap between academia and the working class called groundings. Groundings are a dialectical process of dialogue and exchange aimed at building the revolutionary movement. Rodney saw his studies, travels, and experiences as contributions to groundings, which he shared informally in working-class public spaces and privately through formal lectures.

Groundings with My Brothers is a collection of lectures developed for their practical relevance. These lectures include tidbits of reflections on practice and pedagogy, but mostly include the content that contributed to the process of groundings. In offering a class analysis of Jamaica and various contributions to the Black Power movement, Rodney situates the Soviet example within this broad framework. His interest in revolutionary Russia was part of this larger project of charting “a new direction for Black Studies and African studies” [12]. As he writes in the second essay in Groundings:

Since 1911, white power has been slowly reduced. The Russian Revolution put an end to Russian imperialism in the Far East, and the Chinese Revolution, by 1949, had emancipated the world’s largest single ethnic group from the white power complex. The rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America (with minor exceptions such as North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba) have remained within the white power network to this day. We live in a section of the world under white domination—the imperialist world. The Russians are white and have power, but they are not a colonial power oppressing black peoples. The white power which is our enemy is that which is exercised over black peoples, irrespective of which group is in the majority and irrespective of whether the particular country belonged originally to whites or blacks [13].

For Rodney, the Russian Revolution represented the first major victory in the global movement against racist capitalism and imperialism, which he experienced in various forms as a young person in Guyana and as an adult in Tanzania. Since capitalism is essentially a globally interconnected system, all progressive movements in the capitalist era are also related to and connected with others, while unavoidably maintaining their context-specific uniqueness. Beyond the larger historical interconnections of popular uprisings in the capitalist era, Rodney draws parallels between the experiences of poor peasants in tsarist Russia and the formerly enslaved of the Third World. The practical lessons gleaned from these connections, as highlighted below, are the raw materials for his groundings.

The Third World’s perspective

Reflecting on his own position as a professor, Rodney asks if “people like us here at the university” will follow the example of Cuba and join the Soviet and Chinese-led struggle against white power, against capitalism/imperialism? Even though most who have studied at the University of the West Indies are Black, reasons Rodney, “we are undeniably part of the white imperialist system” and “a few are actively pro-imperialist” and therefore “have no confidence in anything that is not white.” Even if the professoriate is not actively and openly anti-Black but still “say nothing against the system…we are acquiescing in the exploitation of our brethren” [14]. This silence, Rodney points out, is secured through an individualistic approach to progress, displacing the long tradition of collective struggle. As a result, “this has recruited us into their ranks and deprived the [B]lack masses of articulate leadership.” Part of the answer to the question, what is to be done is for Rodney, “Black Power in the West Indies” which “aim[s] at transforming the intelligentsia into the servants of the [B]lack masses” [15].

Like his other works, Rodney’s approach in A View from the Third World is an example of what commitments to Black liberation looked like in practice. In the Foreword to Rodney’s first posthumously published book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, George Lamming offers some crucial insights into the practical lessons Rodney saw in past movements, relevant to our understanding of his approach in A View from the Third World: “every struggle planted a seed of creative disruption and aided the process that released new social forces” [16].

Groundings and the Russian Revolution

Revolutionary Russia was an important source of hope in Rodney’s groundings. A View from the Third World deepens the practical relevance of his groundings on the subject by offering a thorough rebuttal and exposure of bourgeois propaganda aimed at discrediting the Russian Revolution as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and so on. Rodney also speaks to the practicality of revolution by engaging the questions of organization, assessment, and tactics and by examining, for example, the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Finally, while demonstrating the correctness of the Bolsheviks, Rodney does not shy away from surfacing their mistakes, highlighting the insights their successes and mistakes offer contemporary organizers.

Rodney engages these tasks through the method of historiography. A View from the Third World compares and contrasts bourgeois, Soviet, and independent socialist writings on the Russian revolutionary era with an eye toward underscoring relevant lessons for the liberation struggles of his time and place. For example, in the first chapter, Rodney points to the international context to situate his “dialectical materialist” approach to historiography noting that, “there is every reason to be suspicious of the Western European (and American) view of the Soviet Revolution, and there is every reason to seek an African view” [17]. Rodney argues for the necessity of historical accounts that advance the view of the oppressed, of those systematically underdeveloped by the capitalist-imperialist system from which Russia was the first to make a break. In developing this view, he addresses various accusations that the Russian revolutionary era was anti-democratic or authoritarian.

Rodney describes many of the critiques against the Soviet Union, from multiple political positions, as idealist, deterministic, or stageist, because they do not deal with the concrete, materialist balance of class forces but rather with abstract concepts of the ideal, such as predetermined stages of development. Rodney engages the question of Marx and Engels’ predictions regarding where socialism would first emerge as a point mobilized to discredit either Marx and Engels or to claim the Russian revolution was a departure from Marxism.

Marx and Engels’ predictions of the socialist future—which were far and few in between—were informed by dialectical or historical materialism rather than idealism, since they were based on the information they had available rather than on predetermined, universal stages of development. Rodney writes that “historical or dialectical materialism is a method that can be applied to different situations to give different answers. Marx’s comments on Western Europe were based on a thoroughly comprehensive study of the evidence that he had before him… Hence to say anything about Russia would also require close study of what was going on in Russia” [18].

The practical relevance of Rodney’s groundings work to build a mass movement is readily apparent here: without an assessment of concrete conditions, organizers are left with irrelevant and/or incorrect abstractions and formulas not likely to gain much traction. Driving home the practical implications of this point for organizers, Rodney is instructive:

Marxism is not a finished and complete product contained in a given number of texts… Marxism is a method and a worldview. Neither Marx nor Engels believed their interpretations were unassailable given the limited amount of scientific and accurate data available to them, as well as their own limitations. Furthermore, new situations arising after their time required new analysis. This is where Lenin made his major contributions” [19].

From questions of spontaneity in the February Revolution to the issue of dissolving the Constituent Assembly in the October Revolution, Rodney makes a strong case for supporting the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik leadership. He refutes the claim that the U.S., for example, was more democratic than the Soviet Union because it had two major parties. The difference, Rodney points out, is that the U.S. had a bourgeois democracy where the major parties represented the interest of the capitalist class, while the Soviet Union had a proletarian democracy whose ruling party was responsible to–and largely emerged from–the working class and peasantry.

Rodney also addresses the major debates within the international socialist movement. For one example, he foregrounds the international significance of the harsh condemnation of the Bolsheviks by the German socialist Karl Kautsky, “who had known both Marx and Engels since his youth, and after their deaths he became their principal literary executor” [20]. Kautsky argued that Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as proletarian democracy was not yet possible in Russia since the proletariat were not the majority. Consequently, Kautsky concluded that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of state power represented an anti-democratic dictatorship that imposed its will on the peasantry. Rodney summarizes Lenin’s response to Kautsky, setting the record straight that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the political domination of the exploited classes over their former exploiting ones.

Groundings against reactionary academia

Rodney exposes the counter-revolutionary role of academia as one of the primary locations producing anti-Soviet propaganda. Explaining the hegemony or dominance of the bourgeois approach to revolutionary Russia and history more generally, he interrogates “the university institutions that are responsible for the vast majority of research and publications in the field” as “an important element in the superstructure.” Elite universities exist to “serve the interests of the capitalist or bourgeois class” [21]. At the individual level, for example, “the conservative historians always expose themselves by their contemptuous attitude toward the working people” [22].

Even more explicitly exposing the role of universities in serving the larger interests of the bourgeoisie, Rodney points to a 1957 publication by R.N. Carew Hunt, who was “widely believed to be a British intelligence agent” parading as a “scholar and authority on the Soviet Union” [23]. Beyond individual professors, Rodney implicates entire university projects such as Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for War and Peace, which “is notorious for its connections with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department” [24].

Using himself as an example to deepen the practical relevance of his critique, Rodney rhetorically asks, “what is my position? What is the position of all of us because we fall into the category of the black West Indian intellectual, a privilege in our society? What do we do with that privilege? The traditional pattern is that we join the establishment…How do we break out of this…captivity” [25]. He offers three suggestions for academics: 1) to confront pro-imperialist and racist knowledge production; 2) to challenge the idea that racial harmony defines our “post-racial society” by moving beyond the intellectual division of labor in bourgeois academies; and 3) to connect with the masses of Black working and poor people.

Expanding on these directives, Rodney makes an important pedagogical statement that, in challenging the many myths of white supremacist imperialism in the process of connecting with the masses, “you do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they will add something to what you are saying” [26]. As a result of engaging the Jamaican working class as subjects with valuable knowledge, “Rodney encountered a Black Power movement in Jamaica that was already well underway” [27]. But it was a two-way street, and what Rodney contributed was “a framework that critically examined the impact of slavery and colonialism and that gave a foundation for interpreting the current situation of Black and oppressed peoples in these newly independent countries, who continued to be marginalized” [28]. In the Introduction to A View from the Third World, Robin Kelley affirms this contention, writing that “the way Rodney engaged society as a university lecturer was considered ‘strange’ and even dangerous that it was interpreted as a challenge to the establishment” [29]. Outlining what this pedagogy, this practice, looked like in motion, in action, Rodney elaborates:

“I lectured at the university, outside of the classroom that is. I had public lectures, I talked about Black Power, and then I left there, I went from the campus. I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of [B]lack people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting-down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the brothers say. We have to ‘ground together.’…[T]his…must have puzzled the Jamaican government. I must be mad, surely; a man we are giving a job, we are giving status, what is he doing with these guys, [people they call] ‘criminals and hooligans’[?]…I was trying to contribute something. I was trying to contribute my experience in  , in reading, my analysis; and I was also gaining, as I will indicate” [29].

Rodney’s groundings emerged from this powerful combination of research and teaching with his eagerness to learn from, and be taught by, those looked down on by mainstream academia. Committed to the revolutionary fervor of the times, the resulting perception and treatment of Rodney as a threat to the establishment was not an effective deterrent. Rodney’s remarkable and unyielding achievements are among the fruits of the post-WWII revolutionary crisis. As the crisis of capitalism and of the white power structure deepens, so too does the influence of Rodney’s life and legacy.

Conclusion

By the age of 38, Rodney had become part of the same “tradition of intellectual leadership among Africans and people of African descent in the Americas” that includes “Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore and C. L. R. James” [30]. It is important to note that for Rodney, scholarship was not simply an academic exercise but one central to making the academy relevant to the liberation of the oppressed. Jamaican professor Verene A. Shepherd argues that it is Rodney’s pedagogy that is the model for the activist academic, a model that remains relevant because activists in academia are still rare and still desperately needed [31].

A recurring theme throughout not only A View from the Third World, but throughout all of Rodney’s work, is  Marx and Engels’ caution against “applying the dialectic mechanically” because the specific historical development of the balance of competing class interests does not proceed in predetermined, inevitable ways, and that what people do matters [32].

The Liberation School study guide for A View from the Third World will help today’s organizers and activists do just that.

References

[1] Karim F. Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (New York: Daraja Press, 2017), xi.
[2] For a more in-depth analysis of Rodney’s pedagogy see Jesse Benjamin and Devyn Springer, “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals,” in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements, ed. D. Ford, (Boston: Brill, 2019), 210-225. For more on Rodney’s life, legacy, and pedagogy, see Devyn Springer and Derek Ford, “Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview with Devyn Springer,” Liberation School, 12 August 2021. Available here.
[3] Patricia Rodney, “Living the Groundings–A Personal Context,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, ed. A.T Rodney and J. Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2019), 77-85, 77.
[4] Ibid., 77-78.
[5] Ibid., 78.
[6] Vijay Prashad, “Foreword,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (New York: Verso, 2018), vii-xiii, viii.
[7] Ibid., viii.
[8] C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 118.
[9] Ibid., 128.
[10] Rodney, “Living the Groundings,” 80.
[11] Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution, xix-lxxiii, xxviii.
[12] Carole Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Re-grounding the Intellectual-Activist Model of Walter Rodney,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, xi-xxii, xvi.
[13] Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso, 1969/2019), 11.
[14] Ibid., 28.
[15] Ibid., 29.
[16] George Lamming, “Foreword,” in Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1981), xvii-xxv, xix.
[17] Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, (New York: Verso, 2018), 3.
[18] Ibid., 50.
[19] Ibid., 150.
[20] Ibid., 105.
[21] Ibid., 12.
[22] Ibid., 15.
[23] Ibid., 14.
[24] Ibid., 18. For a different example of the same line of inquiry, see Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” Monthly Review, 27 June 2022. Available here.
[25] Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers, 66.
[26] Ibid., 67.
[27] Kelley, “Introduction,” xxviii.
[28] Ibid., xxviii.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Lamming, “Foreword,” Rodney, xvii.
[31] Verene A. Shepherd, “The Continued Relevance of Rodney’s Groundings,” In W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 101-108.
[32] Rodney, A View from the Third World, 170.