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.

Pan-Africanism, Palestine, and the Colors That Bind Struggle

By Shauntionne Mosley

I went to Europe for the first time this year. I stayed for 10 days. Mostly in Paris, but two of those days were spent in London. I took a train from Paris to London with the intention of going to the Notting Hill Festival - a festival I’ve heard about and had been planning on going to for some time now. While in London, I specifically chose my lodging in Brixton because it’s the city's Blackest neighborhood. It was also the location of the Brixton Uprising of 1981. If you know me, I love Black people, Black history, and revolutions. It’s a neighborhood I thought it would be easy for me to blend into, southern American accent or not. I wasn’t entirely wrong. I was surrounded by brown skin of every shade, 4c hair and natural styles, and various accents different from my own. This only increased when I went to the Notting Hill festival itself. Never have I been engulfed by so many people of the diaspora. The roads were barely walkable with the amount of people around me. And their flags: Trinidad & Tobago, Haiti, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica (Jamaicans run London, ok?) and more… all draped on people’s bodies, hanging from the windows of apartments, flying proudly on the tents of different vendors. I cursed myself for not bringing my own. I was going to bring the Pan-African flag I keep at home, but my luggage was already filled to the zippers the day before I left the states. Maybe I could find one there, I thought. 

I went to three different vendors who were selling flags and none of them had Pan-African ones. One man had never even heard of it. I showed him a picture of it on my phone, and he shook his head and shrugged. “We don’t have American flags at Notting Hill,” he said with a chuckle and a thick Jamaican accent. That stung a little. To me, I wasn’t talking about an American flag. I rapidly (and playfully) explained the history of the Pan-African flag, how it was designed by a Jamaican man, and although it has been known to represent Black people in America, it’s really a symbol for the Black diaspora worldwide The vendor listened, then shrugged at me again. He said, “sorry, I’ll remember next year. I promise!” Then he went on to another customer and I went and got some curry goat.  I wasn’t angry at him for not knowing. Can’t even say I was surprised. I don’t expect those abroad to know about Black American history. Lord knows I didn’t learn more about the Black diaspora until college. No, this is not the first time my Blackness was overshadowed by my nationality. However, I did feel stupid again for not bringing my own flag. For it is why the Pan-African flag was created in the first place: Every Race Has A Flag but the Coon. 

I can’t speak for all Black Americans, but personally, I’m Black first and American second. To me, I’m an American because of a clause in the US constitution. I’m American because the African in me was violently beaten and bred out of my people. The continuous genocide of Palestanians in the Gaza Strip has confirmed this for me. As if American slavery, the police shootings of Black lives, disproportionate birth mortality rate of Black mothers, and blatant underfunding of overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods weren’t enough. The horrific deaths and intentional erasure of generations of people, and the bombings of hospitals and churches in Gaza do not only make the miserable migraine of colonization and the Civil Rights movement in America throb in my temple. These savage atrocities carried out by Israel, and funded by the US, force me to pose this question to the US government: how could I possibly be a “fellow American” when I’m Black?

Something that is darkly ironic and sinister about being Black and American during a genocide is when the president speaks. President Biden recently visited Israel and delivered a speech upon his arrival back to the Oval Office. “Good evening, my fellow Americans,” he started with. Was he talking to me? He’s the oldest president to be elected in US history and, like most presidents, from a wealthy family. While I dream of having a president that matches the median age of current America, and is a president that knows what a syrup sandwich is, President Biden continued: 

“The terrorist group Hamas unleashed pure unadulterated evil in the world, but sadly, the Jewish people know, perhaps better than anyone, that there is no limit to the depravity of people when they want to inflict pain on others.”

Better than anyone, he said. After visiting Israel, a country that is responsible for a land, air, and sea blockade over the Gaza Strip, and has been since 2007, making those in Gaza almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. While upholding severe restrictions on the movement of goods, information, and people. Restrictions that leave Palestinians dependent upon another country that has wanted them dead for 75 years. The president of the United States, a country that violently kidnapped people from Africa with the intentions of enslavement and relentlessly halted these people’s progress for 400 plus years. He is the leader of a country that led Native Americans down a Trail of Tears, occupied and abandoned Puerto Rico, and allowed ICE to put Latinx children in cages. 

I must mention that, in America, we learn about the horrors of the Holocaust from middle school through high school in every history class, while the horror history of the other ethnic groups that reside here are “elective” courses. This is not an oppression competition, but America has made it very clear on whose oppression should be discussed and mourned the most. The Never Again Education Act was signed into law by the president on May 29, 2020. The commitment to Holocaust education is written into American law. Meanwhile, the country’s own Black history curriculum teaches how slaves “developed skills'' that could be applied towards their pursuit of happiness and subjects like Black queer studies have been eliminated, the Black Lives Matter movement has been demonized, and reparations for descendants of enslaved Black people are deemed unreasonable despite historical precedence suggesting otherwise. Something the US government might know better than anyone. I doubt The Never Again Education Act will be teaching American students about that though. Or about the concentration camp that is Gaza. Nor will lessons go into detail about a Zionist prime minister committing a genocide. 

It wasn’t done on purpose, I’m sure, but the Palestinian flag has the same colors (aside from white) as the Pan-African flag. The colors of Palestinian flag are the Pan-Arab colors. Each of which represents the successors of the Prophet Muhammad who acted as religious leaders/government officials in Arab history (called caliphate or خِلَافَة). It was also  inspired by a verse crafted by one of the most beloved and emotionally honest poets of the 13th century, Safi al-Din al-Hili, when he wrote: 

White are our deeds, 

black are our battles, 

Green are our fields, 

red are our swords.

The Pan-African flags colors are red, black, and green. Created by Marcus Garvey, Red represents the color of the blood which men must shed for their redemption and liberty, black is the color of the noble and distinguished race to which we belong, and green is the color of the luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland. Both flags stand for these two oppressed groups and their persecution. These flags encourage pride in one’s people, even when there are others telling you there’s nothing to be proud of. The strife for liberation has been never ending for me and mine, and is a strife that Palestanians understand too well. Flagless in Notting Hill, I still danced, ate, and admired faces that looked like kin. I care about all the strangers I met, and felt a sense of relief looking out onto the sea of Black lives. Wishing I had my flag. This fabric of belonging, existence, and claim. Rebel flags must be flown from the river to the sea because the blood of innocent Brown and Black people murks the water. 

If Americans are not on the side of those who are oppressed — and from President Biden’s remarks, they are not — then this man with the highest title in this carnage fertilized land isn’t speaking to me and could never speak for me. I’m mourning the Palestinian past, present, and future that is currently being obliterated, cringing at the fact that the descendants of those who survive this won’t be able to trace their family history. Like Black Americans. I’m also doomfully thinking, maybe even selfishly, about the consequences that must surely come after yet another tragedy funded by America. And how these consequences will be applied to every ethnic group in America that has also been wronged by America; The ones who are only considered Americans in times of war or when we’re abroad and our passports are navy blue. If the soil of Palestine could talk it would cough up blood first, then scream. We the People must not let their, and our, screams go unheard. And we must not let their flags — nor their bodies, belongings, lineage, and livelihoods — disappear under rubble.

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’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview With Devyn Springer

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

The following interview, facilitated by Derek Ford, took place via e-mail during June and July in preparation for Black August, when progressive organizers and activists deepen our study of and commitment to the Black struggle in the U.S. and the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist class struggles worldwide. During this time, we wanted to provide a unique and accessible resource on Walter Rodney, the revolutionary Guyanese organizer, theorist, pedagogue, political economist, and what many call a “guerrilla intellectual.” Liberation School recently republished Rodney’s essay on George Jackson here.

About Devyn Springer

Devyn Springer is a cultural worker and community organizer who works with the Walter Rodney Foundation and ASERE, an extension group of the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente. They’re a popular educator who doesn’t just study Rodney but practices his philosophies. Since 2018, they’ve hosted the Groundings podcast, which is named after Rodney’s revolutionary educational praxis. The podcast, which has addressed an impressive array of topics relevant to the struggle, is available on all major streaming platforms. They’ve written timely and important pieces on politics and education in academic and popular outlets, some of which can be found here. They’ve also produced the documentary Parchman Prison: Pain & Protest, and you can support their work and get access to exclusive content by supporting their Patreon.

Derek Ford: Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview, Devyn. I always look forward to working and learning with you and I appreciate your work on revolutionary movements and education. I know you’re involved with the Walter Rodney Foundation, which is not just about preserving his legacy but promoting the revolutionary theories, practices, and models he developed. Can you tell me a bit about the Foundation, your role, and why it’s important for the movement broadly in the U.S.?

Devyn Springer: The Walter Rodney Foundation was formed by the Rodney family in 2006, with the goal of sharing Walter Rodney’s life and works with students, scholars, activists, and communities around the world. Because of the example Walter Rodney left in his own personal life and the principles he established in his work, we see supporting grassroots movements, offering public education, and the praxis of advancing social justice in a number of ways as what it really means to share his life with the world; Walter Rodney was as much a fan of doing as he was speaking, after all. We have a number of annual programs, including many political education classes oriented around themes related to Rodney’s body of work—colonialism, underdevelopment, Pan-African struggle, scholar-activism, assassination, Black history, the Caribbean, etc. We also run ongoing projects like the Legacies Project, which is actively seeking and collecting stories and oral histories around the world about Walter Rodney.

I’ve volunteered with the WRF since around 2013. I currently help coordinate the Foundation’s social media, and offer other types of support as needed.

I feel the Foundation is crucial for the movement broadly for a number of reasons. First, the critical analysis of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and underdevelopment Rodney gave in works like How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains relevant, and we need organizations dedicated to distilling this knowledge. Second, because our movement must reckon with the lives, works, histories, struggles, and relevance of the elders past and present who we owe so much to, whether it’s the Claudia Jones School For Political Education, the Paul Robeson House & Museum, Habana’s Centro Martin Luther King Jr., or the Walter Rodney Foundation: there needs to be organizations and groups dedicated to maintaining these legacies and continuing their work.

More than just maintaining legacies, in other words, the WRF also makes sure that Walter Rodney’s critical analyses remain critical, and do not get co-opted. Finally, the foundation is important because it is run by the Rodney family, who themselves have extensive decades of organizing, advocacy, and knowledge which is always beneficial. (And I must clarify, whenever I speak of a ‘movement’ broadly as above, I am speaking about the global Black Liberation Movement foremost, in a Revolutionary Pan-Africanist sense).

Those are precisely the reasons we wanted to do this interview, particularly to expose readers (and ourselves) to the broader range and context of his work, and to learn more about the depth of his praxis and why it’s needed today. To start then, can you give our readers a bit of historical and biographical context for Walter Rodney’s life and work? What was happening at the time, who was he working with, agitating against, etc…?

I will try to be brief here and give some basic biographical information, because there’s so much one could say. Walter Rodney was an activist, intellectual, husband, and father, who lived and visited everywhere from Guyana, Jamaica, the USSR, Cuba, and Tanzania, to Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, London, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the U.S., and Canada. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana in March 1942, where he was raised and resided for much of his life. He graduated from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica in 1963, then received his PhD with honors in African History from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London at the age of 24. His thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800, was completed in 1966 and then published in 1970, and I highly recommend it to readers [1].

Rodney was deeply influenced by a number of revolutionary movements and ideologies which had flourished during his lifetime: the multitude of armed African decolonial struggles across the continent, the Black Power Movement in the U.S., Third World revolutionaries like Che, Mao, and Cabral, and Pan-African/Marxist praxis generally. Walter Rodney taught in Jamaica, working to break the bourgeois academy from its ivory tower, where he delivered a number of groundings across the island to the working class, including the Rastafari and other marginalized communities at the time. While at the 1968 Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal, Canada, the Jamaican government banned him from re-entering on the grounds that his ‘associations’ with Cuban, Soviet, and other communist governments posed a threat to Jamaica’s national security. Massive outbursts now known as the “Rodney Riots” subsequently broke out across Kingston. Rodney spent many months writing in Cuba prior to traveling to the University of Dar es Salaam in revolutionary Tanzania in 1969. 

In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of Guyana, but the government (under the dictates of President Forbes Burnham) rescinded the appointment. Rodney remained in Guyana and helped form the socialist political party, the Working People’s Alliance, alongside activist-intellectuals like Eusi Kwayana and Andaiye. Between 1974 and 1979 he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly repressive government led by the People’s National Congress, which can be summarized as publicly espousing Pan-African, anti-aparatheid, and socialist talking points while running a despotic, corrupt Western-backed state operation.

He gave public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political consciousness in the country, and he stated in his speeches and writing that he believed a people’s revolution was the only way towards true liberation for the Guyanese people. During this period he developed and advocated the WPA’s politics of “People’s Power” that called on the broad masses of people to take political control instead of a tiny clique, and “multiracial democracy” to address the steep obstacles presented by the racial disunity between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese peoples (which is still present today).

On June 13, 1980, shortly after returning from independence celebrations in Zimbabwe, Rodney was assassinated in Georgetown, Guyana by an explosive device hidden in a walkie-talkie, given to him by Gregory Smith, former sergeant in the Guyana Defense Force. Smith was subsequently given new passports and secretly flown out of the country. Donald Rodney, Walter’s younger brother who was in the car with him when the bomb went off, was falsely accused and convicted of being in possession of explosives; he fought to clear his own name for decades until April of this year, when Guyana’s appellate court exonerated him. A few weeks later the Government of Guyana officially recognized Walter’s death as an assassination. This comes after years of struggle on behalf of the Rodney family, particularly Dr. Patricia Rodney and the WRF. Walter was just 38 years old at the time of his assassination, but his legacy is continued by his wife, three children, and the dozens of incredible speeches, essays, interviews, and books he gave and wrote.

Rodney’s best-known work is How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Why do you think that is? What are his main arguments there, and are they still relevant to understanding Western imperialism and African resistance?

That’s a special type of book that, like few others, can completely change or deeply influence one’s politics. Rodney essentially put forth a historical-materialist argument showing that economically, politically, and socially, Europe was in a dialectical relationship with Africa, wherein the wealth of Europe was dependent upon the underdevelopment of Africa. In other words, Rodney shows with painstaking detail how European capitalism (and eventually the global capitalist system) could not have existed without the systematic precolonial exploitation of Africa, the massive amounts of capital generated through the Maafa, later the expansive economic, political, financial, and social domination under direct colonial rule, and the continuing—or perfecting—of these exploitative processes under the current neo-colonial world order. As Rodney puts it:

“Colonialism was not merely a system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called mother country. From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labor out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped” [2].

It remains his most recognized work because it remains incredibly relevant, both in the sense that the current world capitalist structure is built on this historical underdevelopment of the South, and because, under imperialism, the North must still exploit and perpetually underdevelop the South. Its publication marked a significant contribution to theories of underdevelopment and dependency. Alongside revolutionary intellectuals like Samir Amin and Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, it was groundbreaking in that it applied Marxism to the Third World with great precision and depth. Further, Rodney goes into detail about not just underdevelopment but the history of class society and feudalism in Africa, social violence, fascism, agrarian struggles, racism, enslavement, gender, economics, misleadership and African sellouts, and so much more. In some ways, I like to think of it as a foundational text for revolutionaries in the same way that many consider Marx’s Capital or Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto to be.

One example of its relevancy is in thinking about labor and the workforce as it relates to slavery. Rodney uses data to explain that the social violence of the Maafa had a deep impact on African development because it removed millions of young Africans from the labor force, created technological regression, and directed whatever mass energy aimed at productive or technological innovation towards the trade in human captives.

He says, “The European slave trade was a direct block, in removing millions of youth and young adults who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production” [3]. I relate this to the crisis of incarceration in the U.S., wherein millions of Africans are removed from the labor force, removed from their families and communities, and in the same way, are removed even from the very opportunity of innovation and production to instead perform hyper-exploited, forced labor at the hands of the settler-capitalist state. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work has, to an extent, explained how the capitalist state necessitates this incarceration, and in the same way I’d suggest that European capitalism’s violently expansive nature necessitated the multitude of exploitative interactions with Africa, from slavery to neo-colonialism.

What about the influence it’s had, not just academically but in terms of revolutionary struggles?

I get letters, emails, and calls almost on a monthly basis from incarcerated people who are reading not only that book but also The Groundings With My Brothers, an underrated gem of Rodney’s. They’ve formed reading groups and created zines around his work; asked me to further explain concepts he mentions; and even drawn incredible illustrations of Rodney. I find this engagement with Rodney equally valuable (and often more rewarding) as that of academics. Patricia Rodney has told me that over the decades incarcerated people have consistently gravitated towards Rodney’s work and written to her, likely because of the accessible way he’s able to break down complex concepts. I’m actually currently working with the WRF on a project to donate many copies of Walter Rodney’s books to incarcerated people, and hopefully in the coming months we’ll have more info to share on this.

Beyond that, Rodney’s work has globally influenced the left in more ways than I could explain or speculate in this interview. His revolutionary African analysis has corrected Eurocentric views of history and allowed us to better understand the important role decolonization plays in our fight against imperialism. He also offers a great example for young writers, researchers, and organizers on how to write materialist history and analyses. For example, as one reads his work it’s impossible not to note the multitude of ways Rodney directly eviscerates bourgeois historians and apologists.

Please keep us updated on the WRF project, because we’ll definitely want to support it. It seems that Rodney was exemplary at achieving true “praxis,” the merging of theory and practice. One of the ways this shows up most is in his pedagogical work–his theories and practices–which he called “groundings.” It’s not just a pedagogy, but a practice of decolonizing knowledge and empowering oppressed people to organize, at least as I understand it. I know it’s influenced your own work and you’ve written about it, so how would you describe it to someone just joining the struggle, or just learning about imperialism, colonialism, and racism?

Yes, I co-wrote a piece titled “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals” that’s available for free online, and which I plan to re-write/expand soon, and my podcast is named after this pedagogical model as well. Usually, when people refer to Rodney’s “groundings” they are referring to his period as a professor in Jamaica, where he quite literally broke away from the elitist academy and brought his lectures to the people: in the streets, the yards, the slums, wherever workers and others gathered. He gave public lectures on African and Caribbean history, political movements, capitalism, colonialism, Black Power, etc. These groundings were often based on what people expressed interest in learning about, and Rodney found ways to make various topics relevant and important to the lives of those listening. In many regards, Rodney should be placed next to popular educators like Paulo Freire for his contributions and his example of merging theory with practice. The book The Groundings With My Brothers is a collection of speeches, many given at or about these groundings [4].

More than just giving public lectures, groundings entailed democratizing knowledge and the tools of knowledge production, which are traditionally tied up with the capitalist academy. He empowered communities to tap into their own histories, oral and written, to generate knowledge and research amongst themselves based on their interests and needs, to place European history and Eurocentric frameworks as non-normative, and to hold African history as crucially important to the process of African revolution. He brilliantly lays out the importance of African history in Black liberation in “African History in the Service of Black Liberation,” a speech he gave in Montreal, ironically at the conference from which he would not be allowed to return to Jamaica [5].

In the most basic terms, I would explain groundings as the act of coming together in a group, explaining, discussing, and exploring topics relevant to the group’s lives; everyone in the group listens, engages, contributes, reasons, and grounds with one another, and all voices are valued. Groundings can take place inside of jail cells, within classrooms, in parks and workplaces, or anywhere the intentions of Afrocentric group dialogue and learning are maintained.

One of the interesting things about The Groundings With My Brothers is the way it moves from Black Power in the U.S. to Jamaica, to the West Indies, to Africa, and then to groundings. As a final set of questions, can you explain what he meant by Black Power and Blackness, and what they had to do with education?

Well, to understand that book you have to understand a bit about the context in which the book arose. In Groundings we see Rodney’s ability to take seemingly large concepts like neo-colonialism, Black Power, Blackness, etc., and break them down to a level that could engage people. It taught them how to make sense of the fact that the people oppressing them were the same color and nationality as them. In the midst of decolonization and independence movements sweeping the world, there was a crucial Cold War and neo-colonization taking place simultaneously. Facilitating this counter-revolution were several African leaders and activists employed to do the bidding of imperialist powers seeking to regain or retain their power. In Jamaica, this was no different: the Jamaican government in 1968 went so far as to ban any literature printed in the USSR and Cuba, as well as an extensive list of works about Black Power and Black revolution, including those of Black Power activists such as Trinidian-born Kwame Ture (Stokley Carmichael), Malcolm X, and Elijah Muhammad.

Placed in this context, we see that Rodney’s work explaining the U.S. Black Power movement’s importance and relevance for the Caribbean and Africans everywhere was quite important in raising the political consciousness of working-class Africans. A key part of this was educating on the role of “indigenous lackeys” or “local lackeys of imperialism” in maintaining the (neo)colonial status quo. In a speech initially published as a pamphlet titled, Yes to Marxism!, he says:

“When I was in Jamaica in 1960, I would say that already my consciousness of West Indian society was not that we needed to fight the British but that we needed to fight the British, the Americans, and their indigenous lackeys. That I see as an anti-neo-colonial consciousness as distinct from a purely anti-colonial consciousness” [6].

His distinct analysis of misleadership and its colonial implications was a searing threat, as Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly wonderfully explains [7].

Rodney defines power as being kept ‘milky white’ through imperialist forces of violence, exploitation, and discrimination, and that Black Power in contrast may be seen as the antithesis to this imperialist, colonial, racial demarcation that structures capitalist society. The following quote is long, but I want to quote it in full because I find it useful. He says:

“The present Black Power movement in the United States is a rejection of hopelessness and the policy of doing nothing to halt the oppression of blacks by whites. It recognises the absence of Black Power, but is confident of the potential of Black Power on this globe. Marcus Garvey was one of the first advocates of Black Power and is still today the greatest spokesman ever to have been produced by the movement of black consciousness. ‘A race without power and authority is a race without respect,’ wrote Garvey. He spoke to all Africans on the earth, whether they lived in Africa, South America, the West Indies or North America, and he made blacks aware of their strength when united. The USA was his main field of operation, after he had been chased out of Jamaica by the sort of people who today pretend to have made him a hero. All of the black leaders who have advanced the cause in the USA since Garvey’s time have recognised the international nature of the struggle against white power. Malcolm X, our martyred brother, became the greatest threat to white power in the USA because he began to seek a broader basis for his efforts in Africa and Asia, and he was probably the first individual who was prepared to bring the race question in the US up before the UN as an issue of international importance. The Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the important Black Power organisation, developed along the same lines; and at about the same time that the slogan Black Power came into existence a few years ago, SNCC was setting up a foreign affairs department, headed by James Foreman, who afterwards travelled widely in Africa. [Kwame Ture] has held serious discussions in Vietnam, Cuba and the progressive African countries, such as Tanzania and Guinea. These are all steps to tap the vast potential of power among the hundreds of millions of oppressed black peoples” [8].

He defined Black Power in the U.S. context as “when decisions are taken in the normal day-to-day life of the USA, the interests of the blacks must be taken into account out of respect for their power – power that can be used destructively if it is not allowed to express itself constructively. This is what Black Power means in the particular conditions of the USA” [9].

Rodney finds there are three ways in which Black Power applies to the West Indies:

“(1) the break with imperialism which is historically white racist; (2) the assumption of power by the black masses in the islands; (3) the cultural reconstruction of the society in the image of the blacks” [10].

I’m sure this was a much longer answer than anticipated, but I find it incredibly important to understand that Walter Rodney’s conception of Black Power was revolutionary, and was also fundamentally inspired by his Marxist approach which sought to apply these revolutionary ideals to the specific context of the Caribbean and Africans globally. He also explains, in detail, his notion of ‘Blackness’ as being stretched differently to how we conceive of ‘Blackness’ today to include the entirety of the colonized world. He states, “The black people of whom I speak, therefore, are non-whites – the hundreds of millions of people whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with another few millions in the Americas;” however he clarifies that “further subdivision can be made with reference to all people of African descent, whose position is clearly more acute than that of most nonwhite groups” [11].

He places Blackness as the most crucial element, stating “Black Power is a doctrine about black people, for black people, preached by black people,” and later adds that “once a person is said to be black by the white world, then that is usually the most important thing about him; fat or thin, intelligent or stupid, criminal or sportsman – these things pale into insignificance” [12]. This understanding stands in relevance to Frantz Fanon’s similar move, where he states: “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” [13].

It wasn’t long but incredibly informative and the context you’ve given has helped me grasp his moves throughout that book. I’ve really appreciated your time and energy, and definitely recommend that our readers check out your podcast and other work. I’m looking forward to our next collaboration!

References

[1] Walter, Rodney A. (1966).A history of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800, PhD dissertation (University of London). Availablehere.
[2] Rodney, Walter. (1972/1982).How Europe underdeveloped Africa(Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 149.
[3] Ibid., 105.
[4] Rodney, Walter. (1969/2019).The groundings with my brothers, ed. J.J. Benjamin and A.T. Rodney (New York: Verso).
[5] Rodney, Walter. (1968). “African history in the service of Black liberation.” Speech delivered at the Congress of Black Writers, referenced fromHistory is a Weapon, undated, availablehere.
[6] Cited in Burden-Stelly, Charisse. (2019). “Between radicalism and repression: Walter Rodney’s revolutionary praxis,”Black Perspectives, 06 May. Availablehere.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Rodney,The groundings with my brothers, 14-15.
[9] Ibid., 18.
[10] Ibid., 24.
[11] Ibid., 10.
[12] Ibid., 9, 10.
[13] Fanon, Frantz. (1961/2005).The wretched of the earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 5.

Walter Rodney on Marxism in Africa (1975)

By Walter Rodney

Republished from Red Sails.

Walter Rodney was born in Guyana in 1942, acquired his doctorate in England at the age of 24, and then traveled widely in the Caribbean and Africa. In 1972 he published his legendary work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was assassinated via a car-bomb in Georgetown in 1980, and the crime is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Forbes Burnham, the president of Guyana at the time. Rodney gave this speech at Queen’s College in New York, USA in 1975. [1]

First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate. When one is asked to speak of the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this particular point in time one is being asked to involve oneself in a historical debate, an ongoing debate in this country, particularly among the Black population. It is a debate which has heightened over the last year and, from my own personal observations, is being waged in a large number of places across this country. Sometimes it appears in the guise of the so-called Nationalist versus the Marxist; sometimes it appears in the guise of those who claim to espouse a class position as opposed to those who claim to espouse a race position. Thus it would not be possible for us in a single session to enter into all the ramifications of that debate, but it does form the background for our discussions.

It is an important debate. It is an important fact that such issues are being debated in this country today, just as they’re being debated in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and in many parts of the metropolitan world — in Western Europe and in Japan — because the widespread nature of the debate and its intensity at this time is a reflection of the crisis in the capitalist-imperialist mode of production. Ideas and discussion do not simply drop from the sky. It is not simply a plot on the part of certain individuals to engage others in a meaningless debate. Whatever the outcome of the debate, whatever the posture the different participants adopt, the very fact of the debate is representative of the crisis in capitalism and imperialism today and, as the crisis deepens, people find it more and more difficult to accept the old modes of thought which rationalize the system which is collapsing. Hence the need to search for new directions and, quite clearly, Marxism and Scientific Socialism pose themselves as one of the most obvious of the available options.

The question is not new to Africa or to the Black people as a whole — that is perhaps essential to understand. Many of us have before raised the question of the relevance of Marxism to this or that. Its relevance to Europe; many European intellectuals debated its relevance to their own society. Its relevance to Asia was debated by Asians; and, to look at it geographically, its relevance to Latin America was debated by Latin Americans. Individuals have debated the relevance to Marxism to their own time. Was it relevant to the 19th century? If so, was it still relevant to the 20th century? One can debate its relevance to a given facet of the culture of a society, or to its law or culture as a whole. These are all issues that have been debated before, and we should have some sense of history when we approach the question today, because with that sense of history we can ask, “Why is it that the question of the relevance of Marxism to society always crops up?” And — a very brief answer — I would suggest that what is common to the application of the question is, first of all, a condition of crisis, a condition of struggle, a condition in which people are dissatisfied with the dominant mode of perceiving reality. At that point they ask about the relevance of Marxism.

More than that, the second condition is people do ask the question because of their own bourgeois framework. Because one starts out located within the dominant mode of reasoning, which is the mode of reasoning that supports capitalism, and which we will call a bourgeois framework of perception. Because one starts out that way, it becomes necessary to raise the question about the relevance of Marxism. After one is advanced, it is probably more accurate to raise the question of the relevance of bourgeois thought, because the shoe would be on the other foot! But initially it is true that however much the bourgeoisie disagree, there is one common uniting strand to all bourgeois thought: they make common cause in questioning the relevance, the logic and so on, of Marxist thought. And therefore, in a sense, unfortunately, when we ask that question, we are also fitting into that framework and pattern. We are also, in some way, still embedded to a greater or lesser extent in the framework of bourgeois thought, and from that framework we ask with a great degree of hesitancy and uncertainty, “What is the relevance of Marxism?”

It is particularly true in our parts of the world — that is, the English-speaking parts of the world — because the Anglo-American tradition is one of intense hostility, philosophically speaking, towards Marxism. A hostility that manifests itself by trying to dissociate itself even from the study of Marxism. If you were to check on the continental tradition in Europe, you would find it is not the same. French, German, and Belgian intellectuals, whatever their perspective, understand the importance of Marxism. They study it, they relate to it, they understand the body of thought which is called Marxism, and they take a position vis-à-vis that body of thought. In the English tradition — which was also handed down to this part of the world, to the Caribbean, to many parts of Africa — it is fashionable to disavow any knowledge of Marxism. It is fashionable to glory in one’s ignorance, to say that we are against Marxism. When pressed about it one says “But why bother to read it? It is obviously absurd.” So one knows it is absurd without reading it, and one doesn’t read it because one knows it is absurd. And therefore one, as I said, glories in one’s ignorance of the position. It is rather difficult to seriously address the question about the relevance of Marxism unless one does the basic minimum of accepting that one should attempt to enter into this full body of thought — because it is a tremendous body of literature and analysis. And from the outside as it were, addressing the question is extremely difficult. Indeed, I would say it is pointless. Strictly from the outside, without ever having moved towards trying to grapple with what it is, to ask “What is its relevance?” is almost an unanswerable question. And I think in all modesty, those of us who come from a certain background — and we all come from that background — one of the first things we have to do is establish a basis of familiarity with the different intellectual traditions, and, as we become familiar with them, we can then be in a better position to evaluate Marxism’s relevance or irrelevance, as the case might be.

Now I will proceed on the assumption that what we are trying to discern in this discussion is whether the variants of time and place are relevant. Or, let me put it another way: whether the variants of time and place make a difference to whether Marxism is relevant or not. In a sense, we would almost have to assume its validity for the place in which it originated, Western Europe. We don’t have the time to deal with that in detail. But we can then ask, assuming that Marxism has a relevance, has a meaning, has an applicability to Western Europe — or had, in the 19th century — to what extent does its validity extend geographically? To what extent does its validity extend across time? These are the two variables: time and place. And those can be translated to mean historical circumstances — time — and culture, which means the place, and what social and cultural conditions exist in each particular place. For us — to make it more precise: Black people — no doubt well-meaning Black people will ask the question whether an ideology which was historically generated within the culture of Western Europe in the 19th century is today, in the third quarter of the 20th century, still valid for another part of the world — namely Africa, or the Caribbean, or Black people in this country [United States]. Whether it is valid to other societies at other times. And this is the kind of formulation which I wish to present [for discussion].

The Methodology of Marxism

I would suggest two basic reasons why I believe that Marxist thought — scientific socialist thought — would exist at different levels, at different times, in different places, and retain its potential as a tool, as a set of conceptions which people should grasp. And the first is to look at Marxism as a methodology, because a methodology would virtually, by definition, be independent of time and place. You will use the methodology at any given time, at any given place. You may get different results, of course, but the methodology itself would be independent of time and place. And essentially, to engage in some rather truncated presentation of Marxism, inevitably oversimplifying, but nevertheless necessary in the context of limited time, I would suggest as one of the real bases of Marxist thought that it starts from a prespective of man’s relationship to the material world; and that Marxism, when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words, [and adapted itself] to the material conditions and the social relations in society. This is the difference with which I will start: a methodology which begins its analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations which arise in production between men. There are a whole variety of things which flow from that: man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature; nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labour, and man’s labour produces a constant stream of technology which in turn creates other social changes. So this is the crux of the scientific socialist perception. A methodology that addresses itself to man’s relationship in the process of production on the assumption — which I think is a valid assumption — that production is not merely the basis of man’s existence, but the basis for defining man as a special kind of being with a certain consciousness. It is only through production that the human race differentiates itself from the rest of the primates and the rest of life.

What does it [Marxism] pose itself against? It poses itself against a number of hypotheses, a number of views of the world which start with words and concepts. For those who are familiar with Marx’s own evolution, it is well known that he started by looking first at Hegel, a very plausible and perceptive analyst of the 19th century who was guilty, in Marx’s own estimation, of putting forward an entirely idealist position, one that placed ideas in the centre of the universe and saw the material world virtually deriving from those ideas. In thinking about this, I felt that I wouldn’t go into Hegel, I would go further than Hegel for a classic exposition of the idealist world view. I take it from the New Testament, the Book of John, where he stated:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God.”

That is the classic exposition of the idealist position. You take every other thing from there: the Word was God! But we are suggesting that the word is itself an emanation from people’s activity as they attempt to communicate with each other, as they develop social relations out of production, and that we shouldn’t be mystified with words. Naturally enough we will have to deal with concepts and with the force of consciousness, which is a very powerful force, which even some Marxists have been tempted to underestimate.

Now Marx, taking that broad framework of methodology, tried to apply it to Western Europe. He applied it to a range of societies in different places and at different times, but he concentrated his attention to Western Europe. If you examine the body of literature produced by Marx and Engels you will find that they speak about slavery, about communal society, about feudalism, but by and large they concentrate on capitalism. They hardly even talk about socialism. Marx’s great contribution was his fantastic critique of an existing society, capitalist society. How did it come into being in a particular part of the world? The vast proportion of their literature concerns this question.

But, as I said when I talked about pre-capitalist society, especially feudalism, they talked about some other parts of the world. Occasionally Marx mentions the “Asiatic mode of production.” Occasionally he came across to look at the data concerning the United States. So he had something of a geographical span and a long time span. But it was so minimal in comparison with the bulk of his work that it is true that a lot of people have taken Marx’s method and his conclusions and have seen them as one and the same thing, that Marxism is not merely a certain methodology applied to Western Europe, but that Marxism is itself an ideology about Western Europe, about capitalism in the 19th century, and it cannot transcend those boundaries. When, clearly, Marx was doing the job he had to do: he was looking at his own society, he was doing it under some of the most adverse conditions, he was doing it by mastering bourgeois knowledge and putting it to the service of change and revolution. I would suggest, then, that the method was independent of time and place. It is implicit in Marx and it becomes explicit in post-Marxian development, using Marxian in the literal sense of the life of Marx himself. After Marx’s death you will get the evolution or the development of scientific socialist thought with other individuals recognizing that the methodology can be applied — must be applied — to a different time, must be applied to a different place.

Again, presenting our history in a very abbreviated form, we can look at Lenin, at his application of Marxist theory to Russian society. That is one of his principal contributions. The young Lenin, the first major thesis which he wrote, was the Development of Capitalism in Russia. He had to deal with his own society. He had to take those formulations out of the specific cultural and historical context of Western Europe and look at Eastern Europe, at Russia which was evolving differently, and to apply it to his own society. This he did. He had at the same time to consider the time dimension. That in the 19th century Marx was writing about what has now come to be called the classic period of capitalism, the entrepreneurial version of capitalism, and by the latter 19th century this had given way to monopoly capitalism. It had given way to imperialism.

So Lenin had to deal with method by applying it to a new dimension in time. So he wrote about capitalism in its imperialist stage. So those are the two variants operating: the ideology, the methodology of it (we’ll stick to the methodology for the time being) being applied to different societies at different times. Having made the point for Lenin, I hope it becomes clear for a number of people: Mao Zedong applying it to Chinese society, which was a different society from Russian society. Understanding the inner dynamics of Chinese society, relating to the question of the peasantry in a different and more profound way than any previous writer, because that was the nature of Chinese society, and he had addressed himself to that. And finally, for our purposes the most important example, the example of Amilcar Cabral. Because he was dealing with Africa. Cabral, in one of his essays, the one entitled The Weapon of Theory, if I recall correctly, one of his most important essays, began by making it clear that the best he could do was to return to the basic methodology of Marx and Engels. But it was not possible for Cabral to begin the analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau by saying: “I am going to look for classes,” for example. He said, “If I say this I will be denying that my people have any history, because I do not perceive classes for a long period in the genesis of my own people.” Then he referred back to Marx and Engels’ classic statement that “the history of all existing societies is the history of class struggle.” To which Engels had appended a note saying that “by all history we mean all previously recorded history.” It so happens that the history of the people of Guinea-Bissau has not been recorded, and Cabral says: “I want to record that history. We will use the Marxian method. We will not be tied by the concept which arose historically in Western Europe when Marx was studying that society.”

Marx uses the method, and he discerned the evolution of classes and of the phenomemon of classes itself as being a major determinant — the major determinant — in western European history at a particular point in time. Cabral says, “We will begin at the beginning. We will not even concern ourselves initially with classes. We will simply look at men in the process of production. We will look at modes of production in the history of Guinea, and we will see how our society evolved.” So, without much of a fanfare, he was showing the relevance of that methodology to African society. If and when in the history of Guinea-Bissau the aspect of class appears to have historical importance, then Cabral dealt with it. Until such time, he simply stuck to the basis of Marxian methodology which was to look at Guinean people in the process of production, social formations, cultural formations which arose historically, and the direction in which the society was tending.

In many respects, when we today ask the question about the relevance of Marxism to Black people, we have already reached a minority position, as it were. Many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as though Marxism is a European phenomenon and Black people responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion. They seem not to take into account that already that methodology and that ideology have been utilized, internalized, domesticated in large parts of the world that are not European. That it is already the ideology of eight hundred million Chinese people; that it is already the ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to successful struggle and defeat of imperialism. That it is already the ideology which allows North Korea to transform itself from a backward quasi-feudal, quasi-colonial terrain into an independent industrial power. That it is already the ideology which has been adopted on the Latin American continent and that serves as the basis for development in the Republic of Cuba. That it is already the ideology which was used by Cabral, which was used by Samora Machel, which is in use in the African continent itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a new society.

It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon, and the onus will certainly be on those who argue that this phenomenon which has already universalized itself somehow is inapplicable to some Black people. The onus will be on those individuals, I suggest, to show some reason, perhaps genetic, why the genes of Black people reject this ideological position.

When we investigate and try to concentrate or keep central the concept of relevance, we must ask ourselves questions abut the present. What kind of society do we live in today? What kind of societies do Black people live in today in different parts of the world? And while of course we as Black people in this country, in the Caribbean and in different parts of Africa, have our own independent historical experience, one of the central facts is that we are all, in one way or another, located within the capitalist system of production. The society about which Marx wrote, through a process of outgrowth, dominated Africa and the Americas in the era of mercantilism, which was the period that capitalism was growing to maturity. It dominated these parts of the world. It created slave society in the Americas. Subsequent to the slave era, capitalism, even more powerful, was able to incorporate the whole world into a global network of production which derived from Western Europe and North America, a system which had a metropolitan centre or set of metropolitan centres, and a separate set of peripheries, colonies, and semi-colonies. So that we have all, historically, been incorporated within the capitalist system of production, and that is another dimension of the relevance of Marxism.

Even without the translation in terms of time and place, it seems to me that if we have become part of the capitalist-imperialist world, then we owe it to ourselves to relate to, to follow, to understand, and to hopefully adopt and adapt a critique of that capitalist system, because that is essentially what Marx’s writing is about. He was criticising that capitalist system. He did it more effectively than any bourgeois writer, and if we want to understand the world in which we live, which is a world dominated by capitalism, then we must understand the centre of that system, the motor within that system, types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production. So that is yet another factor.

Marxism as Revolutionary Ideology

I had originally suggested there were two basic things, and one was the methodology. My second consideration after methodology is to look at Marxism as a revolutionary ideology and as a class ideology. In class societies all ideologies are class ideologies. All ideologies derive from and support some particular class. So for all practical purposes we have grown up in capitalist society, and bourgeois ideology is dominant in our society. These institutions in which we function were created to serve the creation of ideas as commodities, ideas which will buttress the capitalist system. Now I would suggest historically, as Marx suggested himself, that the set of ideas we call “scientific socialism” arose within capitalist society to speak to the interest of the producers in that society, to speak to the interest of those who are exploited and expropriated, to speak to the interest of the oppressed, of the culturally alienated, and we must understand that, of the two major sets of ideas before us — idealism and materialism, bourgeois philosophy and Marxist philosophy — that each of the two is representative of a particular class. I don’t have the time to go into all the historical roots of the formation of socialism but, briefly, in the 19th century it was with the rise of capitalist society that conditions were created for the development of socialist ideas.

Out of the diverse and unsystematized socialist ideas, Marx was able to formulate a clear and systematic theory: scientific socialism. It had a particular class base and because it had this particular class base, it was revolutionary. It sought to transform and upend the relations in society. Bourgeois ideology is of necessity status quo preserving. It seeks to conserve, it seeks to buttress the given system of production, the relations which flow, the relations which flow from a certain system of production. A scientific socialist position remains revolutionary because it aims — consciously aims — at undermining that system of production and the political relations which flow from it. This is what I mean by revolutionary.

From time to time there are Marxists who have arisen who have attempted to deny or denude Marxism of its revolutionary content. That is true. There are Marxists who have become legal or armchair Marxists, who would like to see Marxism as merely another variant of philosophy, and who treat it in a very eclectic fashion as though one is free to draw from Marxism as one draws from Greek thought and its equivalents, without looking at the class base and without looking whether an ideology is supportive of the status quo or not.

Nevertheless, by and large, we can see Marxism and scientific socialism as subversive of and antithetical to the maintenance of the system of production in which we live. Because ideas, let me repeat, do not float in the sky, they do not float in the atmosphere, they are related to concrete relations of production. Bourgeois ideas derive from bourgeois relations of production. They are intended to conserve and maintain those relations of production. Socialist ideas derive from the same production, but they derive from a different class interest, and their aim is to overthrow that system of production.

Africa and Scientific Socialism

There again I will suggest that African people, like other Third World people, have virtually a vested interest in scientific socialism, because it offers itself to them as a weapon of theory. It offers itself to them as that tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilized for dismantling the capitalist imperialist structure. This is its concern.

What I will attempt to deal with, as best I can, are certain questions arising from individuals who might say “yes” to most of what I’ve said, and then will ask the question, “Is there no other alternative? Is there no other ideological system which is neither capitalist not socialist, but is anti-capitalist, but addresses itself more humanely, if you like, to the interest of African people wherever they are?” These questions are worth looking into because there are Black people asking these questions, and we have to try and resolve them. My own formulation will be to suggest that we look at concrete examples of African or Black people who have attempted to devise systems which they consider to be non-capitalist and non-socialist. Systems they consider are valid alternatives to scientific socialism for the emancipation of African people.

In this regard we have a number of Pan-Africanists, a number of African nationalists in Africa, in the Caribbean and in this country, who have taken that road. George Padmore did this at the end of his life, and made a sort of distinction — not a sort, he made a distinction between scientific socialism and Pan-Africanism. He said this is the road we will follow: Pan-Africanism. We do not want to go that road which is capitalist; we do not want to go the socialist road; we will derive for ourselves something that is Pan-African.

In a sense Nkrumah followed up upon this and, although at one time he called himself a Marxist, he always was careful to qualify this by saying that he was also a Protestant. He believed in Protestantism at the same time. So simultaneously he was trying to straddle two worlds; the world which says in the beginning was matter and the world which says in the beginning there was the word. And inevitably he fell between these two. It’s impossible to straddle these two. But there he was, and we must grant his honesty and we must grant the honesty of many people who have attempted to do this impossible task and follow them to find out why they failed. They failed because their conception of what a variant different from bourgeois thought and different from socialist thought inevitably turned out to be merely another branch of bourgeois thought. And this was the problem: that bourgeois thought — and indeed socialist thought, when we get down to it — can have a variety of developments or roads and aspects or paths. Bourgeois thought, because of its whimsical nature and because of the way in which it promotes eccentrics, can have any road. Because, after all, when you are not going any place, you can choose any road!

So for bourgeois thought it was possible for these individuals to make what I consider to be a genuine attempt to break with the dominance of bourgeois thought, and yet find in the final analysis that they have merely embraced another manifestation of that which they themselves at the outset had suggested that they were confronting.

There are a number of examples, some more apt than others. Some of the examples actually are Africans who I think, were blatantly dishonest from the beginning. I do think that most of the ideologues of African socialism claiming to find a third path are actually just cheap tricksters who are attempting to hoodwink the majority of the population. I don’t think they’re out to develop anything that addresses itself to the interests of the African people. But, nevertheless, it is part of the necessity of our times that our people no longer are willing to accept anything that is not put to them in the guise of socialism.

And therefore I shan’t in fact go on to African socialism. What I’ll do is take examples of those who were, in my opinion, being serious, being honest. And certainly Kwame Nkrumah was one of these. Nkrumah spent a number of years during the fifties and right up to when he was overthrown — that would cover at least ten years — in which he was searching for an ideology. He started out with this mixture of Marxism and Protestantism, he talked about Pan-Africanism, he went to consciencism and then Nkrumahism, and, there was everything other than a straight understanding of socialism.

What were the actual consequences of this perception? That is what matters to us. Let us assume that he was searching for something African and that he was trying to avoid the trap of adopting something alien. What were the practical consequences of his attempt to dissociate himself from an international socialist tradition? We saw in Ghana that Nkrumah steadfastly refused to accept that there were classes, that there were class contradictions in Ghana, that these class contraditions were fundamental. For years Nkrumah went along with this mish-mash of philosophy, which took some socialist premises but in which he refused to pursue it to its logical conclusion, in which he would accept that one either had a capitalist system based upon the private ownership of the means of production and the alienation of the product of people’s labour, or one had an alternative system which was completely different and that there was no way of juxtaposing and mixing these two to create anything that was new and viable.

A most significant test of this position was when Nkrumah himself was overthrown! After he was overthrown, he lived in Guinea-Konakry and before he died he wrote a small text, Class Struggle in Africa. It is not the greatest philosophical treatise but it is historically important, because it is there Nkrumah himself in effect admits the consequences, the misleading consequences, of an ideology which espoused an African cause, but which felt, for reasons which he did not understand, a historical necessity to separate itself from scientific socialism. It indicated quite clearly the disastrous consequences of that position. Because Nkrumah denied the existence of classes in Ghana until the petty bourgeoisie as a class overthrew him. And then, in Guinea, he said it was a terrible mistake. Yes, the petty bourgeoisie is a class with interests fundamentally opposed to workers and peasants in Africa. Yes, the class interests of the petty bourgeoisie are the same or at least are tied in with the class interests of international monopoly capital and therefore we have in Africa a class struggle within the African continent and a struggle against imperialism. And if we are to aim at transcending these contradictions, of bringing victory and emancipation to the working peoples, the producers of Africa, we will have to grapple with that ideology, which first of all recognizes and, challenges the existence of exploiting and oppressing classes.

It’s a very important historical document. It is the closest that Nkrumah comes to a self-critique. It is the record of a genuine nationalist, African nationalist, who wandered for years with this assumption and feeling that somehow he must dissociate himself in one way or another from scientific socialism because it originated outside the boundaries of his own society and he was afraid of its cultural implications. That is putting it in the most charitable way. But the fear is due, in fact, to aspects of bourgeois ideology. Due to the fact that he made a distinction between social theory and scientific theory, which is not a necessary distinction. That is the distinction which comes out of the history of bourgeois thought.

People seem to have no difficulty in deciding that they are going to use facets of the material culture that originated in the West, whether it originated in capitalist or socialist society. People have no difficulty relating to electricity but they say: “Marx and Engels, that’s European!” They don’t ask the question, “Was Edison a racist?” but they ask the question, “Was Marx a racist?” They genuinely believe that they are making a fundamental distinction, whereas, in fact, this is obscuring the totality of social development. And the natural sciences are not to be separated from the social sciences. Our interpretation of the social reality can similarly derive a certain historical law and hence scientific law of society which can be applied irrespective of its origin or its originators. Of course, it is true, and this is the most appropriate note on which to end, that any ideology, when applied, must applied with a thorough grasp of the internal realities of a given African society.

Marxism comes to the world as a historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans or — let us go back to Asians; when the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were interwoven obviously and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting. It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that, and to adapt it, and to scrutinize it, and see how it was applicable to their society. First and foremost to be scientific it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.

I have already cited Cabral in another context, and he reappears in this context. The way in which he is at all times looking at the particularities of class development in contemporary Guinea-Bissau, looking at the potential of classes in Guinea-Bissau at this point in time. And therefore he is, of course, making sure that Marxism does not simply appear as the summation of other people’s history, but appears as a living force within one’s history, and this is a difficult transformation. This is the task of anybody who considers himself or herself a Marxist. However, because it is fraught with so many difficulties and obstacles, many people take the easy route, which is to take it as a finished product rather than an ongoing special product which has to be adapted to their own society.

One finds that in looking at this Marxist theory, at its relevance to race, looking at the relevance of Marxist theory to national emancipation, we come up with a very important paradox, and it is this: that the nationalist, in the strict sense of the word, that is the petty bourgeois nationalist, who aims merely at the recovery of national independence in our epoch, is incapable of giving the peoples of the Caribbean any participation in liberal democracy. The petty-bourgeoisie cannot fulfill these historical tasks, for national liberation requires a socialist ideology. We cannot separate the two. Even for national liberation in Africa, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique very clearly demonstrated the necessity for an ideological development — for consciencization, as they say in Latin America — and, the nationalist struggle was won because it came under the rubric of a scientific socialist perspective.

As Cabral said, “There may be revolutions which have had a revolutionary theory and which have failed, but there have certainly been no revolutions which have succeeded without a revolutionary theory.”

Notes

Walter Rodney, 1975. Marxism and African Liberation. [web] ↩

Black American Apathy and Internationalism

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

“…There is no “American dilemma” because Black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them. Black people are legal citizens of the United States with, for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects concerning the white society. Thus institutional racism has another name: colonialism.”

-Black Power: Politics of Liberation.

For those organizing African people towards Revolutionary Pan-African Socialism, a Joe Biden presidency is not a win. It’s a detriment. Understanding neoliberalism breeds fascism would mean that it is a mistake for anyone alleged to be of a “radical politic” to celebrate Biden becoming the president-elect and, by extension, celebrating his running mate, Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, many Africans in the US have strapped themselves in willingly for a presidency that will attempt to be even more hawkish than the Barack Obama administration in every warmongering, drone-dropping, coup-backing, militarized-policing way.

Much of the issues around internationalism stems from a communal lack of political maturity, which helps one analyze their material conditions as they are. Furthermore, a lack of political education obstructs international solidarity with Africans and oppressed people globally. African people in the US make up a colonized nation not dissimilar to colonized nations always under attack by the strongarm of US imperialism and their western allies.

The US military and its 400 bases worldwide serve as occupiers in the same way the (overt) police state does in our neighborhoods. What is the difference between the US African Command (AFRICOM), which is said to “combat the War on Terror,” and militarized policing units like Operation Relentless Pursuit and Operation LeGend, both used in multiple cities across the country to “combat crime and domestic terrorism”? What is the difference between the murderous Israeli occupation of Palestine and the occupation of a colonized neighborhood in the US using IDF trained police units?

There is no difference.

The primary contradictions of imperialism have been distorted by dishonest conversations around “anti- Blackness,” as well as a new sense of American ‘pride’ found in Black Americans that assists in framing all geopolitical issues from an ‘us vs. them’ lens. Global and domestic imperialism are counterparts. African people’s allegiance to the US, and military enlistment, has always existed as a contradiction within the community. While it may be true historically African people were the least favorable to war, Obama’s presidency set the stage for a bold backing of US imperialism by way of patriotism from ‘Black America.’

Although most unite under hating Trump, many earnestly believe the US is worth saving. Mass “get out the vote” mobilizations across the country ensued to “stop full-blown fascism” by asserting a false sense of power in electing a majority unfavorable democratic candidate. The mainstream media announcement of Biden as the 46th president has caused a mass reactionary hysteria and sighs “of relief” that things may return to normal.

As the celebrations have been going on, despite Donald Trump not formally conceding, Biden’s team has been busy, too. Names for potential cabinet members who range from the center to the right have been circling the internet. Jim Clyburn and other democratic centrist moderates are currently vowing to protect the country from going “socialist” by pushing back against the messaging of “defund the police.” 

Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi have congratulated the presumed  president-elect and madame vice president-elect, promising even closer ties and relations. Both Netanyahu and Modi are fascists, in their own right, and part of a more extensive global expansion of fascist leadership, yet neither Biden nor Harris find an issue in continuing the existing relationships despite the very real murderous actions of both men in their prospective countries against Muslims. Coincidentally, alleged crimes against Muslims is the same propaganda use to be actively aggressive towards China and President Xi Jinping that Biden intends to continue with through the Indo-Pacific Command. 

Reactionary Internationalism: Fascists Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu congratulate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on their presumed electoral victory.

With rumors of Dick Cheney potentially being an advisor to Biden on foreign policy, a majority conservative Supreme Court and a majority GOP senate would be a convenient cover for Biden’s actual geopolitics and non-plan for the poor working-class. Biden has built a career in the US government on criminalizing Africans and other colonized people in the US with the racialized “War on Drugs” through policy measures like the crime bill (domestically) and Plan Colombia (globally).

The “open-letter left,” which includes characters like Noam Chomsky and Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, has decided, as a predominately white and economically stable coalition of signatures, to ignore historical materialism for the sake of ousting Trump. They have agreed that any policies that will place colonized people the most at risk, here and abroad, would be worth it so long as it’s not policies signed off on by Trump. Just like during the Obama era, the US left is proving itself useless in not only helping the masses comprehend imperialism but fighting against it by not voting for the man who has never seen a war he disapproved.

“Imperialism, which is the highest stage of capitalism, will continue to flourish in different forms as long as conditions permit it.  Though its end is certain, it can only come about under pressure of nationalist awakening and an alliance of progressive forces which hasten its end and destroy its conditions of existence.”  

- Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism

‘Black American’ apathy through American exceptionalism creates that “sigh of relief” people express now. The indifference to wars and occupation is the result of a rupture in the ability for African people to make the connections between a man promising more policing as a campaign strategy during the height of mass uprisings against the police to his aggressive rhetoric towards nations like Venezuela, China, Iran, etc. Nor the US’ role in establishing brutal neocolonial leadership in the Global South and on the Continent.

It is becoming more and more evident that despite the strengthening calls to ‘Free Palestine’ and more recent actions to ‘End Sars,’ internationalism will again become a backburner issue. How will Africans in the US combat this and re-establish the anti-war internationalism politics that cemented the Black Radical Tradition and politics of the past?

First, we must ruthlessly attack the aversion to political education. The lack of understanding of the Third World struggles adjacent to the struggles of Africans in the US has resulted in liberal reactionary responses to anti-imperialism. Imperialism can not continue to be a vacuum issue by Africans living within the empire of the US. This isolated framing of the world prevents the practice of revolutionary internationalism – international solidarity against the same white supremacist forces that oppress Africans domestically. We are witnessing the frantic reactionary calls to “let people enjoy things” for the sake of identity reductionism.

A #BlackLivesMatter solidarity action in occupied Palestine drawing connections between the murders of George Floyd and autistic Palestinian youth, Eyad Al-Hallaq

Online discourse centered around anti-imperialism is met with push back primarily because people do not possess the political maturity to comprehend the ways imperialism materially affects their everyday lives and the importance of internationalism. Once Africans in the US understand themselves as colonized people on stolen land, there will be a more precise analysis of how liberation is sought and gained through tactics not tied to revolutionary internationalism – not to continuously voting for one’s demise.

For colonized people within the imperial core, there should be no allegiance to America.