Scientific socialism in 21st century Africa

The concept of scientific socialism exploded on to the world scene with the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Europe in 1848. So people might ask "What is the relevance of this concept to 21st century Africa?"

   It is interesting that many of the people who ask this question are Biblical fundamentalists who think that concepts of society written down for use in the Middle East 2000 years ago or more and introduced into southern Africa by European missionaries in a modified form in the 19th century are not only still relevant but must be rigidly applied to in 21st century Africa.

   The beauty of scientific socialism is that it IS scientific and not rigid. Scientific socialism DEMANDS that before we try to change society, we must study the concrete conditions that we are living in at present. It also says that the base of everything, what determines the manner of our existence, is the way we produce the things which we need (or think we need) to live. And not only HOW we produce, but WHO owns the means of production. Under the capitalist system, production itself is social, but the owners of whatever is produced, the chief beneficiaries of production are a small - and increasingly smaller - élite. Even more than in the times of Marx and Engels, that élite rarely participates in production; they buy and sell money, they buy and sell shares. The really rich today do not know, for instance, the technical skills involved in mining or car manufacture; they employ experts to do that. As a consequence, the gap between rich and poor is increasing. People, on the whole are becoming worse off than 30 or 40 years ago and society is losing its stability.

   When Marx and Engels first co-operated together, they believed that revolution would happen first in the most advanced capitalist countries in Europe at that time - Germany, France and Britain. Although their predictions were wrong, in 1848 there were powerful revolutionary movements in all three of those countries. Their predictions were not based on fantasy.

   Following the defeat of those early movements, Marx began his life's work the writing of Capital an immense, detailed study on how capitalism really works, starting with the words:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities", its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

   The basics of what he wrote then have not changed, and with the economic crisis of 2008, even western economists began to study what Marx talked about - the tendency of capitalism towards monopoly and the growing power of finance over production. I have to say this, because people who have never read Marx imagine that he laid down a blueprint for socialism!

   Marx and Engels were dialectical materialists; they believed that our ideas are a reflection of the material world, and that the material world is constantly in motion, in a state of change. While Marx analysed capitalism in depth and in detail, Engels explained the general theory, in particular in the book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Far from being idealists, Marx and Engels were philosophical materialists. Philosophical materialism is not to be confused with what the newspapers call "materialism" and what Marx and Engels call "the fetishism of commodities" -  as represented in today's Zimbabwe by Philip Chiyangwa's ostentatious display of the wealth that he did not produce. They pointed out that it was the capitalist class who were the idealists by imagining that the people of the world will permanently agree to becoming increasingly poor while capitalists who produce nothing become increasingly rich.

   Early in the next century another great revolutionary thinker, V.I. Lenin wrote Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Written in 1916, during the height of the First World War, a war between imperialist blocs, this work analysed the new contradictions posed by imperialism, a result of capitalism reaching its monopoly stage. Lenin later came to the conclusion that revolution leading to socialism was likely to develop not where capitalism is most developed, but where the chain of imperialism is weakest. In 1917, revolution broke out in backward Russia, a country as big as the whole of Africa south of the Sahara, a backward, undeveloped peasant country. In October of that year, it was the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin that took power and started the rapid development of Russia.

   In 1920, the Second Congress of the Communist International (which had been established the previous year largely in response to the Bolshevik victory) adopted Lenin's Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions which stated

   First, what is the cardinal idea underlying our theses? It is the distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations. ...it is particularly important for the proletariat and the Communist International to establish the concrete economic facts and to proceed from concrete realities, not from abstract postulates, in all colonial and national problems.

   The characteristic feature of imperialism consists in the whole world, as we now see, being divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces.

   The Report goes on to support all national liberation movements while understanding that it may not be possible to immediately build socialism in those countries.

   Meanwhile, in young Soviet Russia (it was to become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - USSR in 1922) reconstruction started. We must remember that large areas of this already backward country had been devastated by the First World War and the Civil War which followed the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact the Civil War only finished in 1922. Nevertheless, Lenin called the scientist Gleb Krzhizhanovsky to draw up a plan to electrify the whole country. The goal of 8.8 billion kWh was reached in 1931, and by 1940 increased more than 5 times to 48 billion kWh.

   When Lenin died at the beginning of 1924, following a series of strokes, Joseph Stalin took over the leadership. In 1928, Stalin had this to say:

We have assumed power in a country whose technical equipment is terribly backward. Along with a few big industrial units more or less based upon modern technology, we have hundreds and thousands of mills and factories the technical equipment of which is beneath all criticism from the point of view of modern achievements. At the same time we have around us a number of capitalist countries whose industrial technique is far more developed and up-to-date than that of our country... Do you think that we can achieve the final victory of socialism in our country so long as this contradiction exists?

What has to be done to end this contradiction? To end it, we must overtake and outstrip the advanced technology of the developed capitalist countries... In order to secure the final victory of socialism in our country, we must also overtake and outstrip these countries technically and economically. Either we do this, or we shall be forced to the wall.

   Stalin increased the rate of industrialisation initiated by Lenin. In agriculture they collectivised the peasantry into communal villages. The rich peasants known as the kulaks ("fists" because of their tightness) were moved to remote areas. It was harsh. But when collectivisation took place, urban workers came to teach the young peasants how to drive tractors. Very soon, life in the collective villages became superior to life in the scattered huts. Education and literacy improved. Agricultural production between 1930 and 1940 grew by about 80%.

   Here it must be said that Stalin has had a bad press and has been accused of "killing 20 million people". This figure comes from the imagination of the writer Robert Conquest who worked for the disinformation department of British intelligence. Further, in 1956, Stalin's successor Khrushchev condemned him in an infamous speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a speech believed even by most Communists. Recent meticulous academic research has shown that Khrushchev lied or exaggerated on 63 different issues! Stalin has been reinstated by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation as one of the truly great revolutionary leaders.

   The industrialisation of the Soviet Union enabled it to defeat Hitler during the Second World War. The biggest battle in human history with about 1½ million men on each side took place in the winter of 1941-1942 at Stalingrad. In the summer of 1943, the biggest tank battle in history took place at Kursk. At its height there were more than 3,200 tanks on the German side and more than 7,300 tanks on the Soviet side - testimony to the rapid development of industry under socialism.

   In May 1945, the Soviet Red Army took Berlin the German capital forcing Hitler to commit suicide.

   During the course of the war, Soviet partisans played a major role behind the German lines, sabotaging railway tracks. Elsewhere in Europe, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, France and Italy in particular, Communists led the resistance to fascism. The same was true in the East against Japan; Communists in China, Korea and Vietnam led the resistance to the Japanese.

   The victory of the Soviets, who were responsible for 70% of the fighting in Europe, led to the establishment of socialist democracy in eastern Europe and the restoration of bourgeois democracy in western Europe.

   In October 1945 in Manchester, England, months after the end of the Second World War, the 5th Pan-African Congress was held (not to be confused with the South African political party of the same name). The Pan-African movement had started with the Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900 led by Trinidadian, Henry Sylvester Williams. It was a polite affair, but it was the beginning. Attending that Conference was the main organiser of future Congresses, the American W.E.B. Du Bois.

   In 1903, Du Bois had written The Souls of Black Folk, which, in a somewhat emotional way spoke about the genius of people of African descent - in a world which portrayed black people as less than human. As time went on, Du Bois became more and more influenced by scientific socialism, until in 1961 he joined the Communist Party USA at the age of 93. After that he left the United States to live in Ghana which was led by his most important disciple, Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana and the main founder of the Organisation of African Unity. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963.

   Nkrumah had been a scientific socialist from the beginning. In African Socialism Revisited, Nkrumah poured scorn on romantic, racial Pan-Africanism and defends scientific socialism:

There is only one way of achieving socialism; by the devising of policies aimed at the general socialist goals, each of which takes its particular form from the specific circumstances of a particular state at a definite historical period. Socialism depends on dialectical and historical materialism, upon the view that there is only one nature, subject in all its manifestations to natural laws and that human society is, in this sense, part of nature and subject to its own laws of development.

It is the elimination of fancifulness from socialist action that makes socialism scientific. To suppose that there are tribal, national, or racial socialisms is to abandon objectivity in favour of chauvinism.

   By 1965, Nkrumah had written his most important work Neo-Colonialism the Last Stage of Imperialism - thus following on from the basis laid down by Marx in Capital and by Lenin in Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

   Nkrumah was ousted from power by a coup organised by British intelligence in 1966. Nkrumah had organised the construction of a massive hydro-electric dam on the River Volta and modern port facilities at Tema with the view of creating an aluminium industry in Ghana rather than exporting its abundant bauxite. The development of independent industry in Africa was frowned on by the imperialists and it was because of this that Nkrumah was forced out of power.

   In southern Africa, it was the Soviet Union which mainly funded the liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The dissident organisation ZANU obtained assistance from China from 1967.

   The Communist Party of China had come to power in 1949. Massacres of the workers in the major cities of Shanghai and Canton in 1927 forced the Chinese Communists into the rural interior; thus their revolution became based on the conservative rural peasantry. The denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev was to become a catalyst through which the Chinese Communist Party, influenced by peasant nationalism, was to break with the mainstream Communist movement led by the USSR.

   Here we should remember what Lenin told us many times, history does not move in a straight line, it zig-zags. No one gets it right all the time. What is true, however, is that wherever in the world the scientific socialist ideology has prevailed, significant human progress has taken place. Differences will occur as different countries begin to introduce socialism, and especially in the intermediate, formative stages when the change of ownership of the means of production has to be balanced with the necessity of maintaining and increasing production.

   Rhodesia in 1965 declared UDI; the imperialist centre, Britain realised that the days of white settler supremacy were numbered and had long established the policy of neo-colonialism -  "You can have your national flag, national anthem and black President - but we will control your economy."  The imperialists no longer needed the settlers; the problem for them was how to put a black government into power which would act in their economic interests.

   During this period in the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union produced a number of books which advised African countries not to be too hasty in introducing socialism but rather to develop national democratic economies as a first stage. In such an economy, there is national planning and government owns or at least controls the commanding heights of the economy while productive capitalism is allowed to flourish. Financial speculation is, however, severely suppressed and financial reserves are built up. There is concentration on building the infrastructure of electricity, water and communications. As if they had read these Soviet handbooks, this is just what the Rhodesians proceeded to do under sanctions, although purely in the interests of the white settlers.          

   Meanwhile, the mainstream liberation organisation, ZAPU, in its 1978 Ideological Programme started by quoting Joshua M.N. Nkomo:

The war of liberation in Zimbabwe is based on principles of scientific socialism which alone can bring genuine freedom to all the peoples of the world.

and goes on to say:

ZAPU is convinced beyond doubt that capitalism is the main evil facing the people of Zimbabwe today. It is the root cause of suffering today and, therefore, of the lack of harmonious relations among the people of Zimbabwe.

ZAPU is convinced that socialism is the better system of life and must therefore prevail and be the order of life in Zimbabwe. ZAPU conceives of socialism as the control by the people through their State of the basic means of production - the land and its natural resources, industry, transport, communications, financial institutions (banks), external and internal trade and social services.

The retention and use of all the means of production by and for the people through their State should not imply the negation of personal property. There will be personal property accruing from the just earnings of one's labour.

   Further on it says:

To consolidate the unity of the oppressed masses of Zimbabwe as a basic condition for the success of the liberation struggle, national reconstruction, and social transformation. To attain this objective, ZAPU will mobilise the masses to condemn and reject tribalism, regionalism and racism as reactionary and contrary to peaceful national development and progress.

   This last point has been ignored by certain narrow-minded Mugabeites who imagine that ZAPU is a tribal or regional formation. But the document also warns:

...in search of fresh methods for continued political control and economic exploitation, the imperialist forces are combining efforts in Zimbabwe to divide in every conceivable way the forces of national liberation in order to pave way for neo-colonialism.

  By the time that this document was written in 1978, even the breakaway dissident organisation, ZANU had officially embraced Marxism-Leninism. But the liberation movement was divided and ZANU came into power through the assistance of Britain and America. In an essay written in 1980 soon after Independence called The United States and Africa: Victory for Diplomacy, US diplomat Andrew Young wrote:

Despite widespread doubts outside Zimbabwe about the strength of Mugabe's political constituency, he had achieved a solid electoral victory over both Bishop Abel Muzorewa, on whom both Britain and South Africa had placed their hopes, and Joshua Nkomo, who enjoyed military support from the Soviet bloc. The unexpected size of his majority gave Mugabe an unequivocal mandate which greatly simplified the task of the British in handing over power.
    
The Zimbabwe settlement must also be recorded as a victory of the Western alliance in cooperation with the Organization of African Unity (OAU). It signalled a renewal of the cooperation in de-colonization which came under Western leadership and via the United Nations during the 1950s and 1960s. And it curtailed at least temporarily the trend toward growing dependence on Soviet military aid to bring about African liberation.

   Since then the black elite has plundered. They have dismantled the relatively internalised economy established by the Rhodesians and, under the auspices of western imperialism gave us ESAP. They took land from the white farmers and gave to the black elite with little interest in improving production on that land.

   We as scientific socialists have said consistently, "There is a way out. There is a next step." That next step is to build production through National Planning linked to Devolution of Power. Not "Devolution of Power to the Provinces" - that is in fact federalism which leads only to the establishment of local, tribal elites. We mean that every village and every ward must be engaged in planning. There must be a detailed plan for every District and every town and city. There must be a detailed Plan for every Province. And there must be an over-arching national plan. The Zimbabwean diaspora - including the Rhodesians - must be involved in that plan. (The Rhodesians should in fact be regarded as another ethnic group the same as the Tonga or the Ndau.)

   Government must control the commanding heights of the economy and the productive private sector industry must be encouraged.

   Co-operatives must also be encouraged as they were in the past by the Zimbabwe Project led by Judith Todd.

  There must be severe penalties for corruption and financial speculation.

   The key word must be PRODUCTION.

    Scientific socialism in the 21st century is not merely an option for Africa and for our country, Zimbabwe. It is our only guide, our only way forward - unless of course people wish to remain in poverty and degradation.

Ian Beddowes
General Secretary
Zimbabwe Communist League