Development, Post-Leninism and Revolution in Africa

by Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba

Theories and practices of development are increasingly said to be in crisis.¹ Is this not another proof that, in most cases if not in all, theories and practices of development have been but theories (ideologies) and practices for further integration of the “less developed countries” into the world capitalist economic hierarchical system now in a prolonged crisis? In fact, can ‘national developmentalism’, a localised version of progressivism² or modernism (both variants: perfectibilism and millenarianism), be anything other than bourgeois and capitalist?

Communities that have refused to participate in the process of capitalist integration have been either exterminated (e.g. in the Americas: Indian communities³) or are in a process of being wiped out (northern Brazil) or when they have survived, despite state organised systematic pressure to force them to participate (remaining communities of hunters and gatherers, Hzabe of Tanzania,⁴ Pygmies of the Equatorial forest, Khoi-San of Southern Africa, etc.). On the other hand, the unsuccessful attempt by Kampuchea,⁵ under the leadership of the Khazmer Rouges to break away from the world capitalist market, triggered off an intense sentimental and ideological campaign of denigration almost universally authorizing the military invasion of Kampuchea. Nothing of the sort is attempted towards Apartheid South Africa which is fully integrated into the World capitalist system.

In the literature on development, one has the impression that any social ties hostile to capitalist relations of production are viewed as ‘obstacles to development’ and something that must be destroyed to promote development. Continued underdevelopment of some countries, say Tanzania, has thus been explained in terms of the failure by its state to capture the peasants i.e., failure to destroy the social ties giving the peasants a needed free space to resist against capitalist logic. In the case of Africa, this is a serious matter. Since the Atlantic slave trade, social reproduction has been dependent on those anti-capitalist social ties (kinship system, etc.) which are claimed to be obstacles to development. The partial destruction of those ties or their subordination to capital has produced uprooted people unable to reproduce themselves. The more integrated into the world capitalist market our economies have been, the more the masses have been impoverished and threatened by famine. Even the ecology itself has been affected, making it increasing difficult to support human life. Why all this? Theoreticians of the de-linking process have failed to take advice from the “primitives” who have survived the onslaught of capital. Only a form of society antagonistic, in the way it organises its process of reproduction, to capitalism can succeed in the de-linking process and sustain it. Capitalism has been very successful in integrating surviving slave, tributary/feudal or even “socialist” relationships; it has been unable to put up with communal relationships and their underlying mode of life. It is thus fundamental that the development process that can provide for the large masses of people must be conceptualised and practised along the lines of communal relationships to succeed against capitalist continued underdevelopment of the large masses of the African people.

Paraphrasing Reynaldo G. Heto⁶, we may say that the typical educated African, from the moment he begins to learn about himself, his society, history and culture in books, television and schools, becomes immersed in a “developmental” view of reality. He/she internalises ideas of progress, linear time, scientific reason, humane pragmatism, governmental ordering and other ingredients of the perspective. Bathing in this capitalist international environment in which development is defined, organised and pursued in favour of “advanced” capitalist countries, we become everyday convinced of under-development and the need to catch up with Europe and America. We have adopted modes of life which reproduce this need. To the extent that this modernist form of social consciousness has become generalised and prevalent, one should say that development has succeeded. We can only act and think against the interests of the large masses of African people in favour of a minority dreaming of catching up with advanced countries.

All countries, nations and states (self-proclaimed socialist or not) of Africa, if not of the whole world, proclaim to the world that their ultimate task is to organise a steady march of their countries along a “national development path”. Even those “advanced countries” that develop and keep developing by preventing the development of others claim that it is their responsibility to help “less developed countries” to develop. After the missionaries of faith and of civilisation have passed by, new missionaries of universal development have arisen since the 1960’s. If anything, development has been the cement of the alliance between the leaders and followers of the world capitalist hierarchical system.⁷ This “national developmentalism” - presented as a programme that should make the masses (its victims) support and follow the minority that actually benefits from it - has been in Africa, used the prohibition of politics. Politics is reduced to the bureaucratic manipulation of export commodities and foreign aid to reproduce the state and its elite.

Many brilliant critiques⁸ of processes, theories and practices of development in Africa and around the world have already been made. We won’t be able to add anything new to that. The real problem, in fact, is not the lack of sound analyses, but the fact that despite their very existence, things are still going as if nothing has changed. Criticism of a theoretical kind, as Marx insisted against Feuerbach,⁹ must be completed by a criticism of a practical kind. It is the basis of world capitalism which makes theories or intensifies the poverty of the large masses of the African people that must be revolutionised and destroyed in practice. Even if there was a sound theory of development, in the present context of the African neo-colonial states, such a theory cannot be implemented in favour of the people’s interests. It is clear that the problem of development in Africa, as elsewhere, can only be that of self-development by the people within the limits of the potentialities of each country. This implies the sharpening of the practical critical activity of the African masses to transform the secular basis of their poverty i.e. the problem of development in Africa ultimately concerns the revolutionary political capacity of the African masses. Without a political civil society capable of containing the neo-colonial state that reproduces the poverty of the masses in favour of a minority, development (self-development) is impossible. In fact, our societies, without it, run the real risk of continuously decaying. What is the international situation with regard to the possibility and impossibility of that people’s revolutionary political capacity?

I want to devote the rest of this paper to briefly examining the status of revolutionary politics in the present world situation in general and Africa in particular; some lessons that could be drawn from post-Leninism and the possibility for a new revolutionary politics, in Africa, that will be capable of conceptualising and promoting a people’s self development.

The main difficulty, for those honest African intellectuals who would like to conceptualise a form of African community development different from the capitalist one, has been the lack of clarity on what constitutes anticapitalist modernism, ‘development of productive forces’ is not neutral. Was it just accidental that even Marx saw in colonialism (then, the process of forced integration to world capitalist economy) a real possibility of a “developmental breakthrough”?

We are in the period of a generalised crisis of world capitalism; this crisis is fundamentally rooted in the crisis of fordism.¹⁰ In fact, we are in a world conjuncture of articulated crises: crisis of the imperialist economic order, i.e., crisis of capitalism in the present phase of its imperialist stage; crisis of the experience of post-national independences, or the defeat of revolutionary national liberation struggles (the impossibility for these struggles to have given rise to experiences of socialist transformation); crisis of the experiences of socialist construction in post-revolutionary societies, i.e. the fact that post-revolutionary societies have tended to develop basically in contradiction with Marxist theoretical expectations with respect to the proletarian politics of transition to communist society; and the crisis of the world working class movement and the proletarian class political capacity. All these crisises have in return considerably affected the history of world ideological formations: Marxism as well as what it combats. The two dominant concrete historical forms of politics, the parliamentarian and the one party state system, are in crisis: the representative politics underlying them has increasingly proven inadequate in promoting the interests of the large masses of people. Marxism itself, the theory and practice of the proletarian revolutionary politics, having seen the historical credit that it has enjoyed in almost half a century as a revolutionary political doctrine, gradually withering away, is in crisis¹¹. The three principal references that materiased that credit have been eroded.

First, there have been states representing an actualised revolutionary transformation - as opposed to just a projected one. Those states have attempted and claimed to have been pursuing the construction of socialism, as a stage of transition to communism and incarnating the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was the State reference. Marxism is the only revolutionary ideology to have become a State doctrine. Through this process the marxist idea of a domination of non-domination took shape. The tasks of the proletarian revolution were to gradually, by stages, impose the politics of non-domination in the whole community. Subjectively, the state reference represented the victorious reference. Marxism was experienced in what made it possible, for the first time in history for oppressed people: workers and peasants taking arms and organising themselves to win over their adversary. They actually succeded in destroying the military and state machinery where the strength of old oppressions was concentrated. The adherence to Marxism of workers, intellectuals, and other people was encouraged and strengthened by the idea of victory. The October Revolution was seen as the image of the reversal of the long lasting historical principle of power (might is right). Leninism is first of all a victorious Marxism. Socialist states have derived their historical credit on the same basis, from 1917 to about 1956 for the USSR, from about 1960 to 1976 for the People’s Republic of China. For almost sixty years, those states incarnated the victorious subjectivity. The first historical reference, for Marxism was thus the recognition of a political subject around the theme of victory.

The national liberation wars constituted the second reference. It was an invention, under the leadership of morden parties, of a new form of war, a dissymetrical war based in the rural areas, organising the peasantry and progressing through stages in a protracted manner. China and Vietnam were here exemplary. It was also a question of victory. To Leninism “insurrection is an art” was apposed Mao’s “people’s war is invincible”. A national principle was here fused with a people’s principle; a national liberation war organised simultaneosly in one movement, the creation and building of a nation against imperialism and the process of liberation of oppressed people against semi-feudal constraints.

The last reference was the working class movement itself, involving the western metropoles as well. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, for example, was written for and in reference to a historically very active working class movement. And later on it was through the general element of Marxist reference that this movement manifested its political permanence.

Those three referents - working class movement, national liberation struggles and socialist states articulated Marxism to real history and made it different from other currents of revolutionary opinions. Unfortunately, at times, revolutions, instead of being viewed as inagural events regardless of whether or not they referred to Marxism, were defined through Marxism. Through those references emerged the conviction that history was unfolding in the direction of the credibility of Marxism. Terms such as insurrection, the state, war, nation, trade unionist mass actions, apparently expressing the working class political capacity, find their articulation through Marxism.

The breakdown, step by step, of that system of references could be called the “crisis of Marxism”. This crisis is total,¹² it concerns the question of the state (crisis of socialism), the political capacity of the working class to elaborate and practice a revolutionary politics (especially in imperialist countries) and the politico-theoretico-ideological apparatus of Marxism-Leninism revealed by the failure of Maoism in China and the experience of the Polish working class movement (1970, 1976, 1980-1984).

Marxism is, in its essence politics (e.g. Marx’s letter to Weydemeyer), politics for communism, for the abolition of the Salariat, the reduction of the great differences (intellectual labour\manual labour, city\countryside, industry\agriculture, etc), the extinction of the state and political parties. It is politics, that is absolutely antagonistic to bourgeois politics (for capital, imperialism and the state). It is this politics for communism which is in crisis.

In about 30 years, the process of destitution of the State reference has come to the fore through the critiques of the “really exisiting socialism” - both theoretical and practical critiques. The literature is very extensive on this topic; there is no need to mention specifics here. Some names could be cited as references: Charles Bettelheim, Bernard Chavance, Michel Beaud, R. Bahro, T. Medvedev, D. Rousset, A. Solzhenitsin, Mare Ferro etc. More importantly, there are the movements of resistance of the large masse of people involving workers, peasants and intellectuals within socialist countries since the late 1950’s culminating in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1969). The teachings and practices of these anti-new bourgeoisie struggles have accelarated that process of destitution of the state reference.¹³

Similarly, in a few years, the reference to national liberations - creatively articulating the national and social questions - has come under attack through the critique of liberated nations, such as Vietnam, which have become capable of military expansionism of their own. As a model of the socalled “Third World socialism” (or “Tropical Marxism-Leninism” as Jean Peter calls it), this experience has been crucial to give rise to a doubt on whether or not national liberation struggles, despite creative innovations, can go beyond nationalism and bring about a profound source of a political innovation capable of regenerating Marxism - the politics of communism. While “people’s wars” have victoriously liberated nations against imperialism, it is now doubtful that they have also brought the emancipation of the masses.

There is no Marxism without Marxist workers i.e., workers with a political capacity for revolutionary politics, Marxist politics. The political situation of the working class is thus a crucial question. And this situation is disastrous; contemporary positive working class references come from China (1966-1967) and Poland (1970, ‘76,‘80-‘81). We won’t go into the details for the reasons of this weakness which include, Statism, trade-unionism as a state apparatus of regulation of the capital\labour relation. Poland - since about Gdansk 80 - has completed the “crisis of Marxism” as it has brought about, in a radical manner, the breakdown of the traditional link between Marxism and the working class movement. When Marxism becomes reduced to statism and state trade-unionism, blocking the workers independent political capacity for communism, the link between Marxism and the working class movement is in jeopardy. With the Polish worker’s movement experience, the third reference has thus been eroded.

The analysis of the Polish working class movement has also suffered a lot from the very “crisis of Marxism” which the movement completes. Marxist-Leninists have been the ones above all unable to grasp the universal significance of the movement. True to their statist conception of revolutionary politics, some of them have dismissed the movement as being influenced by the Catholic Church and Western democracies, i.e. external constraints are seen as the motive force of the movement. We will go into details here having already analysed this question elsewhere.¹⁴

We are left with a Marxism without any historical references. This situation has profound implications. Anti-Marxists who derive tremendous joy from this situation are fundamentally mistaken. They repeat old arguments against Marxism ad nauseam with no understanding of the novelty of this situation which confronts us. They proclaim old bourgeois conceptions of politics incarnated in western democracies, i.e., parliamentarism and proclamations of human rights which are also in crisis. Not only are immigrant workers being deported as a matter of policy, the basic social programs achieved through the so-called welfare states, for example, have been gradually eroded. Even positive elements in the liberationist theology and critiques of domination by “new philosophers”, etc. cannot be understood in their novelty, by mere repetition of old arguments. The fact that current revolutionary experiences (Iran, Nicaragua, Poland, The Philippines, South Africa, etc.) have included a certain religious element in them, does not authorise the mere repetition of old doctrines to interpret it. The importance of starting from an empirical recognition of revolutionary practices as inaugural historical events, implies that we recognise the fact that present revolutionary politics have no Marxist references.

The self-reference of Marxism as a result of the long historical “Marxisation” of the working class movement, has thus become, without any historical reference, ideological, fictitious and empty - or else a politics of what the Chinese revolutionaries called “new bourgeoisies”. This type of Marxism - reduced to a discourse entertained by academics and state officials (including those of parties and liberation movements already acting as States) - is fond of referring to the past accomplishments and works of past proletarian leaders, rather than the concrete politically new experiences in the present conjuncture which may throw new light on, and interpretation of those accomplishments and works. Dogmatic defence of Marxism - often by people whose material state is based on that defense - has been repeating ad nauseam the past refutation of the old anti-Marxist objections. New anti-Marxism and old Marxism are of the same phenomenon i.e., the absence of revolutionary politics. Summoned to provide historical evidence for their assertions, dogmatic Marxists fall back to self-reference i.e., the appeals to the “philosophy of dialectical materialism” of the science of “historical materialism”.

Before we turn to the African experience, let us draw some lessons from this short analysis of the “Crisis of Marxism”. Jacques Camatter,¹⁵ among others, has reached the conclusion that the cycle of revolutions (which started with Christian\Buddhist revolutions) has been closed. Capital having won over humanity as a whole, short of a biological mutation (capable of realigning humanity on natural adaptation away from cultural artificial adaptation) humanity is doomed. We cannot be that bold. It seems clear though that the cycle of Marxist-Leninist revolutions is completed; it is unlikely that Marxist-Leninist revolutions will take place that will be fundamentally different from past socialist experiences in crisis. The crisis does not only concern the politics of communism after the seizure of the state power but the very conception of the revolutionary process itself, including the seizure of state power. The failure of the building of the proletarian party of a new type - manifested by the protracted sectarian splitting of parties, among other things - points to this. As we will briefly see in Africa, most self-styled revolutionaries only dream of reproducing the same “socialist Models” in crisis elsewhere. This is thus a serious matter to think about.

The project of peoples’ emancipation politics, based on the working class political capacity, towards a non-oppressive, non-exploitative community - and not a programme, communism is not a programme - remains. It is this, in fact, which requires a rethinking of revolutionary politics. The strategical hypothesis of communism, i.e. the abolition of politics viewed as a process of violence focalised on political domination was Marx’s most innovative contribution - according to himself. What was thought of as a programme (to achieve it), has proven to be another politics of domination. It has not moved away from the old oppressors’ antagonistic conception of politics which, at least in its terminology, has always been the reversal of Clauscwitz’s axiom: “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. The basic concepts of old politics have been militaristic: strategy, tactics, camps, mobilisation, agenda, offensive and defensive movement, position, conquest, troops, alliance, headquarters, peace, etc. Politics is here clearly the continuation of war by other means. These means of the old politics cannot possibly bring about the end of the politics of antagonism.

The process of realising the domination of non-domination must conceptualise the independence of revolutionary politics in relation to state violence while at the same time maintaining its fundamental link to people’s and workers’ historical interventions (events). The real crisis in Africa is the absence of a political civil society capable of circumscribing the state (in its functions of class domination and hegemonic regulation). “Socialism” conceived here as “statisation” almost of everything, has not made this situation any better.¹⁶

---

Paraphrasing Mao, we may say that unless there is a communist process before, during and after the seizure of State power, socialist transition won’t lead to any communism.

---

In some aspects, Lenin’s conception of politics and society for example, was that of the military: society divided in class camps and politics based on power conflicts and concentrated on violence, viewing consciousness as reflection, political reflection thinking is seen as mirroring antagonism. Party sectarianism, in this sense, is not a disorder but an integral part of the conception. This model has been the most cherished one in Africa. Even when classes and class antagonism were opportunistically denied, politics was experienced as a violent process of power conflicts. This has been discouraging even simple solidarity among workers, intellectuals, etc. By the 1970’s for example, “armed struggle”, not even “people’s war”, was seen as the defining character of revolutionary and progressive politics. The other side of this has been the sentimental conviction that criticism comes from the enemies.

In the situation of Marxism without referents, revolutionary politics must be anchored in new communist forms of social consciouness among the masses. It does not seek to represent the victims - even through a scientifically elaborated programme, by self-styled representatives; it interprets what is said in workers’ and people’s interventions. Contrary to the two dominant historical forms of politics, now in crisis (parliamentarian and one party State models), the new politics takes consciousness as thinking and not a simple reflection of antagonism. It asserts that people think and that this fact constitutes the material basis of thought.¹⁷ The old politics has tended to start from the belief that people don’t think (at best they only reflect/mirror social antagonism) and masses of people viewed as force in the revolutionary tactics but not as processes of thinking. The party has often substituted itself in place of people’s thinking. (The party thinks for you and defines what is good for society and what is not). Recognition of this thinking implies fundamentally the need to have confidence in the masses of people.

What and where are the concrete forms of consciousness enhancing the communist process? This is a revolutionary task in the present context. In Africa, only artists have more or less taken it up. As shown by the Polish working class experience, a protracted working class political consistency (systematic solidarity) on the basis of communist forms of social consciousness, is ultimately more important than the assaulting capacity which may be highjacked - especially when communist tendencies in society are not strong. Very briefly political organisation must reflect that consistency and be a materiality of thinking judgement not an agency for implementing a programme elaborated by representatives of the victims. The issue here is: what can prevent the party from becoming a mere state structure?

The representative conception of politics has thus been another limitation of the old politics. Lenin advanced the notion that the social is represented in the political; (“politics is the concentrated expression of economics”) - philosophically adopting leibnizian expressive causality. The existence of parties and the site of politics were said to be thought on the basis of these representation and concentration metaphors. Historically, in their social composition, there have been no class parties. It is typical of dialectics to go against representation. Dialectics is predicated on grasping the possibility of an impossibility. Communism as a mode of life, for example, is a bet; nothing represents it in capitalist society. Mass practices and thinking are contradictory processes between Revolution and Communism through forms of consciousness that must be deciphered. These are some of the indications that Paul Sandevince calls post-Leninism.

The Marxist experience in Africa has tended to be attempts at trying to Africanise Marxist orthodoxy. One unfortunately, finds in many cases, that what passed as original Marxist contributions were but results of insufficient grasp of the orthodoxy in its historical variations. Having often failed to grasp the historicity of each Marxist breakthrough (October 17, The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, etc.), African Marxists have tended to view Marxism as a scientific discourse (a “tool of analysis”, a “transhistorical method”), a technology, or a consecrated “revolutionary ideology” one had only to “adopt”; governments, parties and even liberation movements have found it completely normal to “adopt” Marxism-Leninism, as a “tool” that guarantees victory. “Tropical Marxism-Leninism”, a statist Marxism, creating “parties of labour” after the seizure of the colonial or neo-colonial State power, has been the focal experience of African Marxism. It is not surprising that in a number of cases this has come about through the military. When it started with the civilians, the “military section” of the party has become the core of the ‘revolutionary process’. A critical sum-up of this experience is crucially needed for the benefit of the African revolutionary politics. African Marxist-Leninists have also been among those very hostile to the bringing out of this sum-up.

As far as we know the experiences of the national liberations led by Amilca Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, Pierre Mulele in Congo-Kinshasa, Samora Machel in Frelimo’s liberated zones of Mozambique, EPLF in Eritrea have been some of the most creative attempts at concretely practising Marxism in Africa. The conceptions of the politics of social emancipation and the theoretical contributions we are aware of, hardly internalised the teachings and lessons drawn from the failures elsewhere - to at least prevent similar failures. Until the 1980’s, Frelimo cadres, for example, were still conceptualising revolutionary victory as the process of becoming a little Soviet Union (i.e. a ‘socialism of the rich’ - as a Mozambican engineer put it).

Cabral, who readjusted the Marxist focus in history by claiming that the development of productive forces was more fundamental and inclusive than class struggle as motive force of history, basically restored thus the technocratic conception of Marxism which was critiqued by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Don’t forget class struggle). The notion of the vanguard party, based in revolutionary intellectuals (who have committed class suicide), in the absence of an independent working class political capacity, is a form of elitism that finally is legitimised by the adoption of the ‘revolutionary ideology’.

In all cases, the creative insight has always been eroded by the urgency of the seizure of state power as the priority of priorities. “Seek ye first the political kingdom and after everything else will be given unto ye” - as Kwame Nkurumah says. In Africa, Marxism has tended, due to the absence of an African international working class movement, to be inscribed inside nationalism. Beyond the bourgeois cycle of revolutions, nationalism has hardly been revolutionary. In fact, the mere existence of the African working class as a political class with independent organisations, i.e. with a political project, intervening at the historical scene, has been impossible to have - with maybe the exception of South Africa where the working class is starting to emerge on the historical scene. African Marxists have not often given serious consideration to the centrality of the factory as the site of proletarian politics.

Some genuinely emancipative experiences, however, such as Frelimo’s successes in the liberated zone, became curtailed through and after the seizure of the colonial State power. Was it due to the way political independence was arrived at? Perhaps. The new State has not, on the leaders’ own admission, strengthened working class political capacity - in a country that exports workers to South Africa. Some national liberation movements, unfortunately, are still engaged in revolutionary practices already foreclosed by experiences elsewhere. Not everything that moves, to paraphrase the Chinese slogan, is red - but to concentrate on looking for what is red may hide what is realty moving. Some self-styled liberating groups have no politics other than just arming peasants!

To conclude, even development requires that the masses are capable of exercising critical control over their own self development. Short of this, even self-styled revolutionary nationalism in the present world context cannot actualise the process of development that can provide for the basic needs of the masses.