The Communists and I: A confutation of the ultimate revolutionary ideal

  By - Menzi Maseko

Allow me to state unequivocally, I do not believe that any of the known western systems of governance can at anytime help Africa out of its challenges. We cannot be rescued; neither should we expect it from anybody else but ourselves. There is no one from heaven or any other part of this earth that can save us from white supremacy, imperialism and from our own greed. This is a fact that we should become familiar with and from that point on we should begin to ask ourselves, whereto from now?

 “The fundamental character of the social, economic and cultural renewal we urgently need will require a change of both our hearts and our minds. But that change will demand a new kind of politics – a politics with spiritual values.” – Introduction to Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics ‘A Practical and Prophetic Vision for Change’

Ever since I became politically conscious, I have struggled with some basic concepts of Communism, if not the ‘doctrine’ itself but its supposed efficacy within the African setting.

I have supported many Socialist ideals, agreed with many communist authors and comrades on a number of ideas and platforms, but there is always something that causes me to doubt that this is the right path towards an African re-awakening.

Surely as my communist friends have oft reminded me, many Pan-Africanists and leaders of the independent African countries were either influenced by or were card-carrying communists themselves. But to me that is either here nor there, I know that it was not their being communists which drove them to strive for the liberation of their people against imperialism.

The dichotomy between the nationalists, the communists and the pan-Africanists is well documented and the African National Congress learned very earlier on that the communists were their allies in the fight against Western hegemony and imperialism, but they were still careful not to conform totally to the communist agenda, for reasons that I will expound on later.

Communism merely identified and gave a name to the common enemy, and the fathers of communism being Europeans themselves knew best about the roots of the villainous capitalist system and they in turn attempted to dismantle it as best as they knew how. But I say that this was done for the ultimate good of their own people and not for we.

The fact that people such as Che Guevara, Franz Fanon, Jean Paul Satre and many other brilliant minds were also communists is not enough to convince me that I should also wave the red flag or make Marx, Lenin, and Engels my holy tri-unity, the famous freedom fighter and these former writers and deep thinkers were moved more by the human condition rather than some system that they later embraced.

It was one of my personal favourite former communist authors – the esteemed Milan Kundera, who clarified this contradiction for me, in one of his brilliant satirical works Laughable Loves  and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting* and in one of his interviews:

“The metaphysics of man is the same in the private sphere as in the public one. Take the other theme of the book, forgetting. This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of the self. But what is the self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.  But forgetting is also the great problem of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of organised forgetting. This is what is currently happening in Bohemia. Contemporary Czech literature, insofar as it has any value at all, has not been printed for 12 years; 200 Czech writers have been proscribed, including the dead Franz kafka; 145 Czech historians have been dismissed from their posts , history has been rewritten, monuments demolished.

A nation which loses awareness of its past gradually loses its self. Politics unmasks the metaphysics of private life; private life unmasks the metaphysics of politics.”- From An Interview with Phillip Roth.

I have tended to agree with my comrades regarding some of the the uses of the communist model, and how socialisms ultimate end is communism, but I still cannot help thinking that Black Africa requires a special type of model to emancipate our self from all deleterious  aspects of Euro-centrism. I think that the use of the communist political templates causes a lot of politicised Africans to be lazy minded and to not strive to look any further or to look within for African models of selfhood.

We must remember ourselves, remembering is our only restorative means towards a revolutionary end, keeping in mind that even revolutions must be sustained states rather than mere events.

We must remember also that ours is not just a competition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie or between the haves and the have not’s, surely the black mans burden is far more than that surely we have learned from the victories and the pitfalls of leaders such as Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah and the yet unmatchable Thomas Sankara.

Here is what some objective socialists have had to say on the subject of socialism vs. capitalism:

“But what spokesman of the present generation has anticipated the demise of socialism or the “triumph of capitalism”? Not a single writer in the Marxian tradition! Are there any in the left centrist group? None I can think of, including myself. As for the center itself—the Samuelsons, Solows, Glazers, Lipsets, Bells, and so on—I believe that many have expected capitalism to experience serious and mounting, if not fatal, problems and have anticipated some form of socialism to be the organizing force of the twenty-first century.

... Here is the part hard to swallow.

It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, von Miseses, e tutti quanti who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. Mises called socialism “impossible” because it has no means of establishing a rational pricing system; Hayek added additional reasons of a sociological kind (“the worst rise on top”).

All three have regarded capitalism as the “natural” system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system.”  – From Robert Heilbroner.
“The World After Communism.”
Dissent (Fall 1990): 429–430 ( Robert Heilbroner, a socialist for most of his adult life, was the Norman Thomas Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the New School for Social Research and author of the best-seller The Worldly Philosophers. He died in 2005. )

“The history of socialist movements is complex and fascinating, bound up with the histories of organized labor, of economics and left-wingpolitics in general, and, less honorably, with that of revolutionsand totalitarianism. Leftists, of course, tend to be historically-minded, so we're very good at writing our own histories, at remembering ancient incidents and finding precedents in them. Of course, like everyone else, we're also very good at convenient amnesia. Few of us care to remember just how much support the Soviets had, long after it had become clear to anybody with an eye cracked open that they were far, far worse than capitalist democracies, and in a league (after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, literally) with the Fascists.” – Socialism, Market Socialism

It is important to state that I am radically opposed to the capitalist economic theory and that I consider the Republic of South Africa one of the most unfortunate governmental experiments ever. If I had to give examples, it would take us forever to arrive at a chorus of aha!

But the purpose of this paper is not to simply expose the failures of a black nationalist government, whose leadership love calling themselves a Liberation movement in power, they should call themselves a Liberties movement in power, since they are more about taking liberties with state resources rather than true liberty. But then again, many of these leaders are quite well versed in political theories, having been raised on substantial amounts of communist and western capitalist propaganda.

RSA even boasts a quite mind boggling tri-partite alliance between Free Market Capitalists, a Labour Union and A South African Communist Party; yes, all of them sit in one bench and are well fed by the bloodthirsty imperialist powers. Obviously these are the simple pleasures of a democracy, such strange bed-fellows and painful compromises, but to the detriment of whom?

The Public

It has been said that many well meaning governments have begun their leadership stints as self professed socialists only to end up abandoning all those ideals due to the pressure of free market capitalism. I often think that we all tended to give to much credit to our governments, this is more so within the African continent where public servants have tended to play the role of reverend patriarchs.

The sheer arrogance and complacency with which they assume in their roles clearly displays their understanding of the public greatest weakness, which is ignorance. Perhaps this ignorance of basic politics can be attributed to general levels of poor education or plain old laziness.

Even leadership debates have tended to focus mostly on the roles of politicians, corporates and other blindly accepted forms of authority.

We the people don’t seem to understand the amount of power that we have shifted to our so called leaders, while allowing ourselves to be misled into every possible direction. A clear example of this is the RSA’s notorious 1996 Growth Empowerment and Redistribution (GEAR) economic strategy and subsequently all deals regarding Private ownership.

Trevor Manuel made GEAR the ANC’s official economic strategy without negotiating it with the alliance partners, South African Communist Party and COSATU, whose leaders were just merely consulted, but their opinion was not required. The ANC top brass, white capitalists and the World Bank had simply decided for the people and that was that.

Of course this resulted in many confrontations with the civil society movements and many socialists, but this appeared to the ruling party as merely the expected squeak of democracy, a battle between mice and men.

The disastrous consequences of South African leadership were basically the result of a misunderstanding of the Purpose of government, a purpose which many of us failed to effectively remind them of.

Perhaps we tried through the many service delivery protests and Labour unions many marches against privatisation, and disastrous macro-economic policies yet these appear to have fallen on increasingly deafened ears. It is also possible that a significant number of RSA citizens are either not interested in political education or maybe we are still unlearning the mental blockages of the apartheid system; either way our lethargy is costing us dearly and we are slowly realising the horrors of being lead or mislead by an increasingly authoritarian government where even the police have become the most dangerous armed force, routinely terrorising the public.

“World history and recent events show that independence leads to voluntary acceptance of world ideas. If I could trust my own interpretation of the language of Nigerian politics, I should conclude that Nigeria aspires to join the community of nations and to share the ethos of our age. Citizenship involves the theory and practice of politics. Some schools of thought regard the study of politics as part of moral philosophy.

Morality, it has been said ‘is the very sinews of politics, being in truth nothing more than the conscience of a nation striving to express itself in state action.’ This definition of politics needs special emphasis in Nigeria to-day, because too often political discussions concentrate on the mechanics of Governance to the exclusion of the purposes of Government.” – R.K. Gardner, Citizenship In An Emergent Nation: A Lecture Delivered before Members on an Extra-Mural Residential Course at Oshogbo, Nigeria, 1953.

Dear reader, please bear with me if I seem to have drifted further from the topic; I must remind you that my refutation of communism and socialism does not stem from any personal animosity or mistrust of communists, it actually emerged from my observance of local and global politics.

Having always viewed politics from the vantage point of an observer who also was not interested in getting into the partisan feuds that I grew up witnessing I had plenty good reasons to approach any

political theory with scepticism. 
So much has my pessimism grown that I even rejected the notion of democracy as I saw it.
The concept simply did not seem to hold any water for me and the majority of Black people. I had read quite a bit, but still could not recall any place in the world where real people power was realised through this system. Of course I then grew to understand that even democracy evolves and takes many forms according to the vision of the rulers and the will of the public.

In closing let us look at the role that socialism has played in the ruling party here in Azania/RSA. I will not engage in describing a concise history of socialism and the relationship between the Societs and the other subsequent communist countries with both the ANC charterists, the unions and even with the Pan-Africanists that will require a much larger paper.

 Allow me to simply let the following quote to put it as it is:

“Many leftist commentators have echoed labor’s allegations of an ANC ‘sell-out,’ arguing that the 1990’s marked a sudden, unexpected turn away from a socialist tradition towards neoliberalism. In some analyses, ANC leaders driven by contingent conveniences were simply lured and duped into accepting the agenda of the IMF and the World Bank ( Bond 2005; Klein 2007: 194 -217). Framed in almost conspiratorial tones, this line is however unconvincing, Entrepreneurial views of black social emancipation have always been much thicker than socialism in the ANC’s ideological tradition.” - ( Franco Barchiesi – Precarious Liberation , p.83-84)

As a person who is always interested in learning, I often ask my communist friends to ‘school’ me about the virtues of communism, but all I ever get are half-baked rants which do nothing to reduce my level of mistrust of such a theory. I also believe that we can have a clear an effective theoretical and practical Black Consciousness without leaning on Communism. The fact that the forefathers and mothers of BC also read Marx, Hegel and many of the European communist theorists does not mean that we must follow suit. Our realities have changed ever so slightly, the public sphere has been opened widely by new technologies and even though we are still grappling with certain trappings of White Supremacy, we are even more capable of developing our own unique social contracts.

Surely so many Black people are able to innovatively usher in a new Earth where nature, commerce and spiritual progress is nurtured without dependence on borrowed concepts, no matter how noble.

What I hope and strive for is a succinct and universally applicable yet Africa-centred theory which addresses the needs of people without depending on tried, tested and failed Eurocentric strategies.

Writers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Eskia Mphahlele, Mazisi Kunene and many more have alluded to the fact that we as a people are capable of so much more than we have been before.

Is that too much to ask, or are we incapable of remembering that We The People are the ones we have been waiting for and that we have done all this before. The future is in our hands, will we shape it or will it be pre-fabricated for us?

TBC


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