The politics of identity cannot build unity or liberate, Sharon Smith in: ISR Issue 57, January–February 2008

ISR Issue 57, January–February 2008 The politics of identitySHARON SMITH argues that identity politics can't liberate the oppressed FIGHTING AGAINST oppression is an urgent issue in U.S. society today. Racism, sexism, and homophobia have all reached appalling levels—that seem only to rise with each passing year. White students in Jena hang nooses, and Black students end up in prison.1  Squads of Minutemen vigilantes patrol the Mexican border with impunity, for the sole purpose of terrorizing migrant communities.2 College campuses across the U.S. commemorate “Islamo-fascism awareness week” as if it were just another legitimate student activity.3 Fred Phelps and his Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church congregation regularly picket outside funerals of gay soldiers killed in Iraq, proclaiming that they belong in hell.4 To be sure, the problem extends way beyond the extremist fringe. Media pundits barely comment on the outrages described above, while mainstream discourse regularly heaps contempt on those attempting to fight against oppression—including young women organizing against date rape (which is assumed to be a figment of their feminism-charged imaginations) and immigrants demanding basic legal rights (as if they are out to steal jobs from native-born workers). If the “playing field is level,” as so many in the mainstream media assume, those who object must therefore be seeking an unfair advantage. It is no wonder, therefore, that so many people who experience oppression feel so embattled in the current political climate. Only a movement aimed at fighting oppression in all its forms can challenge the victim-blaming ideology that prevails today. The pressing need for such a movement is acknowledged here. Indeed, this article is intended to address the issue of how to most effectively fight back, since different political strategies lead to quite different conclusions about the kind of movement that is needed to challenge oppression. The bulk of this article is a critique of the theory behind what is known in academic and left circles as “identity politics”—the idea that only those experiencing a particular form of oppression can either define it or fight against it—counterposing to it a Marxist analysis. My central premise is that Marxism provides the theoretical tools for ending oppression, while identity politics does not. Personal identity versus the politics of identity It is important to make a clear distinction between personal identity and identity politics, since the two are often used interchangeably. But there is a substantial difference between these two concepts. Possessing a personal “identity,” or awareness of oneself as a member of an oppressed group—and the anger associated with that awareness—is a legitimate response to experiencing oppression. Racism is, of course, experienced on a very personal level—whether it takes the form of institutional discrimination (racist hiring practices, police brutality) or social interaction (racist jokes, violence from an acknowledged racist). Personal experience, furthermore, helps to shape one’s political awareness of oppression. It makes perfect sense that experiencing sexism on a personal level precedes most women’s political consciousness of sexism as a form of oppression that degrades all women. Indeed, no white person can ever understand what it is like to experience racism. No straight person can understand what it is like to experience homophobia. And even among people who are oppressed by racism, every type of experience is different. A Black person and a Native American person, for example, experience racism differently—as does a person from Mexico versus a person from Puerto Rico. A gay man and a lesbian have quite different experiences. At the same time, personal experience is quite separate from the realm of politics, which involves strategies to affect society as a whole. Personal identity only becomes political when it moves beyond the realm of life experience and becomes a strategy for fighting against oppression. Every set of politics is based upon a theory—in this case, an analysis of the root causes of oppression. So the analysis of oppression informs the politics of social movements against oppression. There are clear differences in strategy between Marxism and the theory of identity politics, which will be examined below. It is first necessary, however, to make clear which facts are not in dispute. Both theories are in agreement that all oppression is based on genuine inequality. Men and women are not treated as equals in society. Whites and African Americans are not treated at all equally. Oppression is not a matter of perception, but of concrete, material reality. Nor is there any doubt that struggles against oppression should be led by the oppressed themselves—women themselves can and will lead the struggle for women’s liberation. This has always been the case historically, from the struggle for women’s suffrage to the fight for abortion rights. The same dynamic is true of the struggle for Black liberation. Former slaves and other African Americans led the battle for Reconstruction aimed at transforming Southern plantation society in the decades following the Civil War. African Americans led the mass civil rights movement that finally struck down Southern segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. During the late 1960s, the powerful civil rights movement inspired the rise of movements for women’s and gay liberation, while the struggle for Black Power emerged from the civil rights movement itself. All of these new movements were, in turn, inspired by the armed struggle of the North Vietnamese resistance against the forces of U.S. imperialism. The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) chose its name as a formal identification with the National Liberation Front (NLF)—the Vietnamese resistance. But it is also the case that women and African Americans were not alone in fighting against their oppression—thousands of men took part in the women’s movement in the 1960s, and many thousands of whites actively supported the civil rights movement. The gay liberation movement was the first of its kind—erupting in the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, when New York City police raided a gay bar and touched off a riot among gays that lasted for three days. Although the gay movement won little support in its early stages, movement leaders soon convinced the Black Panther Party to formally endorse gay rights. In 1970, Black Panther leader Huey Newton announced his solidarity with the gay movement: “homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in this society. Maybe they might be the most oppressed people in the society,”5 Who’s the real enemy? As the experience of the 1960s shows, it is not necessary to personally experience a form of oppression to become committed to opposing it. Yet the central premise of the theory of identity politics is based on precisely the opposite conclusion: Only those who actually experience a particular form of oppression are capable of fighting against it. Everyone else is considered to be part of the problem and cannot become part of the solution by joining the fight against oppression. The underlying assumption is that all men benefit from women’s oppression, all straight people benefit from the oppression of the LGBT6 community, and all whites benefit from racism. The flip side of this assumption, of course, is the idea that each group that faces a particular form of oppression—racism, sexism, or homophobia—is united in its interest in ending it. The theory of identity politics locates the root of oppression not with a capitalist power structure but with a “white male power structure.” The existence of a white male power structure seems like basic common sense since, with rare exceptions, white men hold the reigns of the biggest corporations and the highest government posts. That is true, but it only tells half the story. It would be highly inaccurate to assume that all oppressed people are powerless in U.S. society today. Since the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a significant number of women, gays, Blacks, and other racially oppressed minorities have managed to climb up the corporate and political ladder and become absorbed into various power structures. These individuals have achieved a fair amount of power in their own right. In the upcoming 2008 presidential election, the two Democratic Party frontrunners are a woman (Hillary Rodham Clinton) and an African American (Barack Obama). The speaker of the House of Representatives is a woman, Nancy Pelosi. The U.S. secretary of state is a Black woman, Condoleezza Rice. One of the most powerful politicians in Washington is openly gay Congressman Barney Frank. Whose interests have these women, gays, and African Americans represented once they have achieved some power within the system? The answer is fairly plain to see—not necessarily by believing their rhetoric, but by judging their actions. Rather than fighting against the racist, sexist, and homophobic policies of the system, they become part of enforcing them. For example, when the city of San Francisco began handing out same-sex marriage licenses in 2005, did openly gay Barney Frank embrace it as a step forward for civil rights? On the contrary, Frank called a press conference to attack gay marriage as “divisive.”7 Has Senator Barack Obama rushed forward to defend the six Black youths victimized by racists in Jena, Louisiana? The candidate did not make an appearance at the historic civil rights protest in Jena on September 20, 2007.8 Yet Obama has devoted ample time on his recent speaking circuit to exhort Black men to become better fathers, as he did in June 2005 addressing Black worshippers at Chicago’s Christ Universal Temple: “There are a lot of folks, a lot of brothers, walking around, and they look like men...they might even have sired a child.... But it’s not clear to me that they’re full-grown men.”9 If a white politician had delivered a similar lecture, it would have immediately—and accurately—been denounced as utterly racist. Nor does Condoleezza Rice hesitate to perform her duty as she wanders the globe in her role as U.S. imperialism’s key international enforcer—traveling to the Middle East, for example, to enforce Israel’s racist apartheid policies against its occupied Palestinian population. Iranian people will be no better off if and when the U.S. decides to bomb them if Clinton or Obama occupy the White House than Iraqi people were when the Bush administration decided to invade their country. What all of these examples show is that there is no such thing as a common, fundamental interest shared by all people who face the same form of oppression. Oppression isn’t caused by the race, gender, or sexuality of particular individuals who run the system, but is generated by the very system itself—no matter who’s running it. It goes without saying that we must confront incidents of sexism, racism, and homophobia whenever they occur. But that alone is not going to change the racist, sexist, and homophobic character that dominates the entire system. Class inequality and oppression The entire element of social class is missing from the theory of identity politics. The same analysis that assumes Barack Obama shares a fundamental interest with all African Americans in ending racism also places all straight white men in the enemy camp, whatever their social class. Yet, the class divide has rarely been more obvious than in the United States today, where income and class inequality is higher than at any time since 1929, immediately before the onset of the Great Depression.10 It is plain to see that the rich obtain their enormous wealth at the expense of those who work for them to produce their profits, a process known as exploitation in Marxist parlance. Class inequality is not a side issue, but rather the main byproduct of exploitation, the driving force of the capitalist system. Class inequality is currently worsening by the minute, as the economy edges its way toward a deep recession. Yet the theory of identity politics barely acknowledges the importance of class inequality, which is usually reduced to a label known as “classism”—a problem of snobbery, or personal attitude. This, again, should be confronted when it occurs, but such confrontations do not change the system that relies upon class exploitation. In contrast to the inconsistencies and contradictions of identity politics, a class analysis bases itself on materialism—a concrete and objective measure of systemic benefits derived from racism, sexism, and homophobia. In short, the ruling class has an objective interest in upholding the capitalist system, which is based upon both oppression and exploitation, while the working class has an objective interest in overthrowing it. For the special oppression of women, Blacks, Latinos, other racially oppressed populations, and the LGBT community actually serves to increase the level of exploitation and oppression of the working class as a whole. The ruling class has always relied upon a “divide and conquer” strategy to maintain its rule, aimed at keeping all the exploited and oppressed fighting against each other instead of uniting and fighting against their real enemy. At the most basic material level, no one group of workers ever benefits from particular forms of oppression. The historic role of racism in the U.S. provides perhaps the clearest example. The prevailing view is that if Black workers get a smaller piece of the pie, then white workers get a bigger piece of it. In fact, the opposite is true. In the South, where racism and segregation have traditionally been the strongest, white workers have historically earned lower wages than Black workers in the North.11 The same dynamic holds true for men and women workers. When lower paid women workers enter an occupation, such as clerical work, in large numbers the wages in that occupation tend to fall. The dynamic is straightforward: Whenever capitalists can force a higher paid group of workers to compete with a lower paid group, wages tend to drop. The same dynamic also holds for the global capitalist system. When U.S. capitalists force their workers into competition with workers in the poorest countries, U.S. workers’ wages do not rise; they fall. And that is precisely why U.S. workers’ wages have been falling in recent years. The only beneficiaries are capitalists, who earn bigger profits, while ensuring the survival of the rule of the profit system. It is also important to recognize that all working-class people suffer from some forms of oppression. Workers pay much higher proportions of their incomes in taxes than rich people and have far less leisure time; working-class schools are underfunded and overcrowded, poorer neighborhoods are more run-down, and the streets have more potholes. Perhaps most significantly, prevailing ideology regards workers as generally too stupid to run society—assuming this is better left to the “experts,” dooming the vast majority of workers to a lifetime of alienated labor. So oppression is something that even most white male workers suffer to some degree. If one were to compare the self-confidence of the vast majority of white male workers to that of the arrogant Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice, it would be clear that something more than personal politics is a determining factor in oppression. The problem is systemic. The point here is not at all to trivialize racism, sexism, or homophobia—but to understand that the entire working class faces oppression and has an objective interest in ending it. To be sure, workers don’t always realize this. Male workers can behave in an utterly sexist manner; white workers—male and female—can embrace racism; and straight workers—Black, white, and Latino—can be completely homophobic. But such behaviors are subjective—they vary from individual to individual and, unlike objective interests that remain the same, subjective factors change according to changing circumstances. Most important among these is the Marxist concept of “false consciousness.” The definition of false consciousness is straightforward: whenever workers accept ruling-class ideologies, including racism, sexism, and homophobia, they are acting against their own class interests—precisely because these ideas keep workers fighting against each other. False consciousness is not unique to white, male workers. One of the most obvious examples of false consciousness has occurred in recent years, as large numbers of African Americans oppose immigrant rights using many of the same xenophobic arguments as anti-immigrant racists. Similarly, many Puerto Rican people exhibit prejudice against Mexican people (which is racist). Many women call each other “sluts” (which is sexist). These are all examples of false consciousness. Whenever the levels of racism, sexism, and homophobia rise, the working class as a whole loses out. Workers do not unite to fight back, and living standards drop. Conversely, when workers move into struggle against the system in large numbers, false consciousness is challenged by the need for class unity, and class-consciousness rises—affecting mass consciousness as a whole. This process was demonstrated at the highest point of class struggle in the 1930s and again at the height of the movements of the 1960s. And it will be demonstrated again with the next rise in mass struggle. As Marx argued in theCommunist Manifesto, “This organization of proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.”12  Put differently, Marx distinguished between the working class “in itself,” which holds objective—but unrealized—revolutionary potential, and a working class “for itself,” which acts in its own class interests. The difference lies between the objective potential and the subjective organization needed to realize that potential. Politics in a void But identity politics does not acknowledge the potential for mass consciousness to change. For this reason, the theory of identity politics can only be accepted at the highest level of abstraction. Ernesto LaClau and Chantal Mouffe, the originators of identity politics, do not seem the least bit concerned with any practical application of the theory laid out in their book,Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.LaClau and Mouffe emerged from the postmodern wing of academia that flourished in the 1980s, proposing a set of theories aiming to prove that society exists not as a unified and coherent social and economic system, but rather in a range of subjective relationships. LaClau and Mouffe posit their theory as a step forward from Marxism. In reality, their theory is not post-Marxist at all. It is anti-Marxist. These two academics set out to prove that Marx was wrong about the revolutionary potential of the working class—that is, its objective interest in and power to transform the system. This antagonism to Marx makes sense, because if Marx is right—if the working class is capable of building a united movement against all forms of exploitation and oppression—then their theory goes out the window. There are two key components to LaClau and Mouffe’s theory, both of which become problematic the moment the theory is put into practice. The first component is their definition of oppression. In contrast to Marx—who defined oppression and exploitation as objective and therefore unchanging, but consciousness as subjective and therefore ever-changing—LaClau and Mouffe regard oppression itself as entirely subjective. This is a fundamental, not semantic, difference. Since oppression is an entirely subjective matter, according to LaClau and Mouffe, anyone who believes that they are oppressed is therefore oppressed. At its worst, that would include a white male who feels he has been discriminated against when his application is turned down for a law school that practices affirmative action. Conversely, even the most clear-cut instances of systematic brutality are not necessarily oppression. LaClau and Mouffe argue that even serfdom and slavery do not necessarily represent relationships of oppression, unless the serfs or the slaves themselves “articulate” that oppression.13 LaClau and Mouffe describe society as made up of a whole range of autonomous, free-floating antagonisms and oppressions, none more important than any other—each is a separate sphere of “struggle.”14  But this concept falls apart once it is removed from the world of abstraction and applied to the real world. Separate struggles do not neatly correspond to separate forms of oppression. Forms of oppressions overlap, so that many people are both Black and female, or both lesbian and Latino. If every struggle must be fought separately, this can only lead to greater and greater fragmentation and eventually to disintegration, even within groups organized around a single form of oppression. A Black lesbian, for example, faces an obvious dilemma: If all men are enemies of women, all whites are enemies of Blacks, and all straights are enemies of gays, then allies must be precious few. In the real world, choices have to be made. If LaClau and Mouffe are correct, and the main divisions in society exist between those who face a particular form of oppression and those who don’t, then the likelihood of ever actually ending oppression is just about nil. At its heart, the politics of identity is extremely pessimistic, implying not just a rejection of the potential to build a broad united movement against all forms of exploitation and oppression, but also a very deep pessimism about the possibility for building solidarity even among people who face different forms of oppression. The only organizational strategy identity politics offers is for different groups of oppressed people to each fight their own separate battles against their own separate enemies. The second key problem with LaClau and Mouffe flows from the concept of autonomy that is so central to their theory. Most importantly from a theoretical standpoint, Laclau and Mouffe go to great lengths to refute the Marxist analysis of the state, or the government. Marxist theory is based upon an understanding that the government is not a neutral body, but serves to represent the interests of the class in power—which in the case of capitalism is the capitalist class. This should not be too hard to imagine in the era of George W. Bush, when the capitalist class has brazenly flaunted its wealth and power. But Laclau and Mouffe insist that the state is neutral and autonomous. Even the different branches of government are autonomous from each other. Apparently, the Senate and the House of Representatives have no real relationship, and the White House is similarly autonomous. If that is the case, then the stranglehold of neoconservatives and the Christian Right over U.S. politics since 9/11 must have been a figment of liberals’ imaginations. Thus, there is a serious flaw in this logic. Oppression is built into the capitalist system itself, and the state is one of the key ways in which oppression is enforced—through laws that discriminate and the police who serve and protect some people while harassing and brutalizing other groups of people. But the theory of autonomy leads to another theoretical problem as well: every separate struggle warrants equal importance, no matter how many people are involved on either side, and whether or not demands are being made against the state or other institutions. Indeed, LaClau and Mouffe carry this logic a critical step further, noting that “struggle” need not involve more than one person. It can simply denote a matter of achieving “increasingly affirmed individualism.”15  The personal struggle in this process substitutes for political struggle, leaving the system that maintains and enforces oppression intact. Like LaClau and Mouffe, theorists who advocate the most extreme forms of identity politics do not actually aim to build a movement, large or small. They prefer small groups of the enlightened few, who remain content in their superiority to the “ignorant masses.” Marxism offers a way forward for those interested in ending oppression in the real world. As Marx remarked of his generation of smug academics, “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”16 Marxism and oppression The caricature that often passes for a critique of Marxism today assumes that a united working-class movement of all the oppressed and exploited requires subordinating the fight against oppression to the fight against exploitation. But this caricature has been proven wrong historically. Both exploitation and oppression are rooted in capitalism. Exploitation is the method by which the ruling class robs workers of the wealth they produce; various forms of oppression play a primary role in maintaining the rule of a tiny minority over the vast majority. In each case, the enemy is one and the same. As the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin, put it, the Marxist vision of revolution is a “festival of the oppressed and exploited.” But he also added: “Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected.”17 The argument here is straightforward: The lessons of building a united movement against capitalism train workers to act in solidarity with all those who are oppressed and exploited by capitalism. The battle for class-consciousness is a battle over ideas, but it is one that must be fought out in the context of struggle, not the musings of self-important academics. Sharon Smith is author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working Class Radicalism in the United States (Haymarket Books, 2006) and “Mistaken Identity: or can identity politics liberate the oppressed?”. She has a biweekly column in Socialist Worker that also appears on Counterpunch. 1 See Howard Witt, “Louisiana teen guilty in school beating case,” Chicago Tribune, June 29, 2007. 2 See, for example, Judy Keen, “Calls to get tough on illegals grow; Residents far from border seek controls,” USA Today, April 19, 2006. 3 Barbara Ehrenreich, “It’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week!” Thenation.com, October 22, 2007, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/ehrenreich. 4 Brendan Bernhard, “Preaching a gospel of hate,” New York Sun, December 4, 2007. 5 Quoted in Barry D. Adams, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 80. 6 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. 7 “Rep. Frank opposes gay marriage effort,” CNN.com, February 19, 2004. 8 “Jesse Jackson: Obama needs to bring more attention to Jena 6,” CNN.com, September 19, 2007. 9 Liam Ford, “Obama’s church sermon to black dads: Grow up,” Chicago Tribune, June 20, 2005. 10 Aviva Aron-Dine, “EW in in 2005data show income concentration jumped again in 2005: Income Share of Top 1% At Highest Level Since 1929,” Center on Budget and Policiy Priorities, October 24, 2007. Available online at http://www.cbpp.org/3-29-07inc.htm. 11 See Victor Perlo, Economics of Racism U.S.A.: The Roots of Black Inequality (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 168. 12 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 18. 13 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Press, 1985), 153–54. 14 Ibid., 178. 15 Ibid., 164. 16 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume One, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969) 13–15, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. 17 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 5(Moscow: International Publishers, 1961), 412.

Why Are Black Elites in the Caribbean and the US Rewriting the Legacy of Walter Rodney? by Dr. Matthew Quest on Tues.03/08/2016

Why Are Black Elites in the Caribbean and the US Rewriting the Legacy of Walter Rodney?

source: Black Agenda Report  http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/4984

article by Dr. Matthew Quest on Tues., 03/08/2016 

By Dr. Matthew Quest

The current government of Guyana, along with black elites across the Caribbean, and black U.S. apologists for Obama are rewriting the legacy of Walter Rodney to suit their own purposes, The Rodney they celebrate in statues and symposiums only vaguely resembles the man who walked among and organized students and workers against some of these same black elites in his day.

Why Are Black Elites in the Caribbean and the US Rewriting the Legacy of Walter Rodney?

By Dr. Matthew Quest

“...should the legacy of Rodney be permitted to be part of a false discourse of reconciliation in Guyana, the Caribbean, and the African world?...”

The delays of the Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry (WRCOI) in Guyana of February 2016, in not transparently bringing its report to the public about the Forbes Burnham PNC government’s role in Rodney’s assassination in 1980, are disturbing. Whatever happens now, it has been a defining issue. The lack of public clarification of the nature of the dictatorship and repression of that historical period, that Rodney’s Working People’s Alliance was so instrumental in resisting, continues to suggest more than one dilemma for dialogue about history and the future.

There are concerns that given Guyana’s fiftieth anniversary of independence this year, the legacy of Rodney raises an obstacle to peaceful celebration and makes national reconciliation difficult. But why should the legacy of Rodney be permitted to be part of a false discourse of reconciliation in Guyana, the Caribbean, and the African world? This is a more complicated matter than the release of official documentation of what happened in Guyana, though those contributing to mystification and bewilderment in the present government should not be absolved of their responsibility.

Who was Walter Rodney? There seems to be a consensus that Rodney was a Pan Africanist, a socialist, a scholar. Yet some say he was a human rights activist, an ambiguous advisor on economic development. Others say he was an anti-fascist, involved in armed struggle, and advocated people’s power. Could he have been all of these things?

It appears human rights activists raise concerns as a loyal opposition under the premise that the nation-state, that normatively brutalizes us, can embody reason. In contrast, when living under a fascist dictatorship, anti-fascists have to overthrow authoritarian regimes or risk being killed by them.

Economic advisors generally are professional classes who propose plans for statesmen to manage people, as one of the nation’s natural resources, from above society. Aspirations toward a more direct democracy and workers self-management, the “people’s power” that Rodney advocated (and that was expressed by bauxite workers, independent cooperatives, and landless sugar workers in the Guyana of his era) were in conflict with Burnham’s state centered nationalism and Pan Africanism.

“...The invented “Rodney” as human rights activist and advocate of economic development is reconcilable with a sense of wonder that, had he not been assassinated, he may have become a future president of Guyana...”

Why have there been silences in recent years avoiding the matter that Rodney was a revolutionary who wished to overturn nation-states and ruling classes above society? In order to have a democracy (majority rule) must we not object to those who wish to be the minority who seek legitimacy for their rule above society? We must be on guard that the WRCOI not be a vehicle for aspiring rulers seeking a thin veneer of legitimacy. Can Rodney, the anti-imperialist, contribute to their authenticity? Some of his legacies, if poorly understood, might contribute, and we must remain vigilant.

It is true that part of the legacy of the struggle in Guyana is that Forbes Burnham used illegal means to justify fraudulent electoral victories. But does the process of free and fair elections guarantee our lives are beyond authoritarian abuses? Are there constitutional checks and balances against police brutality, mass incarceration, rape, and shanty towns when our votes are counted fairly?

The invented “Rodney” as human rights activist and advocate of economic development is reconcilable with a sense of wonder that, had he not been assassinated, he may have become a future president of Guyana. There is a type of lamentation for an international icon whose significance is quite protean. Rodney certainly had the charismatic mandate in an otherwise racially insecure and divided society to achieve this type of office. But Walter Rodney also, legend has it, had a critique of maximum leadership personalities as embodying a nation or a party that claimed to speak for people. If this be true, what deep understanding of his radicalism could lament that he never became president?

Symposiums on Rodney’s life and work seek to dovetail Rodney’s legacy with Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. Mandela’s “truth and reconciliation” in South Africa discarded the ANC promise of redistributing wealth and empowering the common people. King, the martyr who nevertheless dialogued with President Johnson’s White House to discuss movement strategy, had a “dream” that there could be increasingly equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy under property relations. This King is reconcilable with post-independence Guyana, the Caribbean, and Africa for many with emaciated conceptions of Black empowerment.

The analogy between Rodney and Dr. King is wrong because King divided the domestic anti-racist struggle, from the struggle against poverty in the United States, and the international anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam for almost a decade – his last symbolic initiatives and well-wisher’s myth-making notwithstanding. Why was the March on Washington of 1963 not also “the poor people’s campaign” of 1968? In contrast, Rodney internationalized the struggle against racism and colonialism by linking up the experience of Jamaica, Guyana, Tanzania, and the United States. Rodney ruptured with white supremacy and Black officialdom.

There are those who long for Rodney someday to be like John F Kennedy in Guyana, another martyr elevated to a pantheon as a shining prince who might have been. But Kennedy invaded Cuba and the Congo so what about him so glistened? Why do we wish Rodney recognition by what the Guyanese national poet, Martin Carter, termed “the shining governments of the damned?”

Perhaps the most heinous silence is that one can witness gatherings in Walter Rodney’s name be quiet about the crimes of President Obama. In both Jamaica and Guyana, Rodney inspired uprisings of Black working people against Black capitalist politicians and their Black police. Why are Rodney’s legacies muted when they should be placed in conversation with the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions? Obama’s target assassination of thousands without trial by drones in his global wars in Africa and the Middle East, remind us that many can be satisfied with any form of “Black Power.” Are Walter Rodney’s legacies reconcilable with American Exceptionalism and disorienting Black insurgency?

“...Can Rodney be incorporated into a forerunner of the contemporary Black political class? The government of Guyana must seek to do just that...”

If race vindication seeking to defend President Obama has trumped anti-imperialism and subordinated Pan Africanism to a cultural front around the emperor of the world in the name of U.S. national security, why can’t Rodney find a place back home in the false pantheon of national greatness in Guyana sponsored by ruling elites, whose careers prospered through silence about his death?

Walter Rodney has already had a monument dedicated to him in Guyana. Can Rodney be incorporated into a forerunner of the contemporary Black political class? The government of Guyana must seek to do just that. Where might their motivations and strategies come from? Grasping this requires radical questioning beyond preserving the legacies of Rodney to establishing our own.

Rodney is famous for writing How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. We can see, if we read carefully, in fact that book has a dual heritage. One can see in embryo the struggle of social classes in precolonial Africa through his insightful narrative. But that history also argues that empire underdeveloped Africa’s capitalist modernity, and this makes it an attractive book for aspiring rulers in the African world whom believe their social classes’ pursuit of wealth, not the self-directed liberating activity of people below them, embody self-determination. A whole sector of bewilders of the African world have been raised up on Rodney’s underdevelopmentthesis and it is time we reconsider why they are so damn delighted. Certainly, this gathering of forces are not chock full of insurgents. Many are administrators of our lives.

Do we understand the empire of capital as not permitting everyone in the globe to aspire equally to capital accumulation? Or do we view it as a system which degrades toilers on a world scale as a result of the alienation of wage labor/capital relations? If race and class struggles are interwoven who shall be permitted to personify the next development in Black autonomy?

In contrast, Rodney’s Groundings with my Brothers captures best the insurgent orator and activist that many hope we forget. In 1968, he inspired an uprising of the Jamaican workers and unemployed by speaking not just about African civilizations but to the fraud of cultural representation marshaled by the post-independence Jamaican government. There was symbolic appropriation of Marcus Garvey, Nanny, Sam Sharpe, and Paul Bogle by the Black led nation-state. The memory of Maroonage and provisional notions of Black self-government were consciously used to contain new explosions against not simply white supremacy and empire but the new Black political class.

Forbes Burnham attempted to do similar things with “culture,” wielding the Berbice Rebellion and Cuffee, the heroic slave of Guyana’s heritage, as mystification. Of course Africans werehuman. But how did Africans come to brutalize and kill other Africans in the name of national liberation and retaining state power? The Rodney led movement was best placed to challenge Burnham’s rule in 1979-1980. Rodney was killed in the struggle over the deeper meaning of Black power.

Is it not peculiar then that the Rodney who criticized the Caribbean state building monuments to forerunners of Black Power, leading to mass insurrection, now has a monument in Guyana, where there is little sense of a conflict for his intellectual and political legacies? These may yet surface. But history is not made in the manner we might hope.

New rebellions will come out of conflicting tendencies in the Caribbean political environment and must rupture with bureaucratic stage directed struggle. What of the current Caribbean Reparations campaign led by statesmen and high up university officials who have never disturbed anyone? Why is their touchstone in the Age of Obama reparations from Britain based on the general date of slavery’s abolition in 1833?

Surely many inspired by Rodney are attracted to the idea of reparations for slavery and how empire underdeveloped the Caribbean. Yet, the bigger question of reparations for Walter Rodney’s legacy is not do African people deserve them. Rather, the question is on what terms did Rodney propose to repair – the root word of reparations – society?

“...The most important legacy of Walter Rodney, and the Caribbean New Left (1968-1983) generation that he was a part, was that Rodney publicly asked which social class leads the national liberation struggle?...”

Rodney wished to repair racial insecurity among the working people but he did not seek reconciliation or a peace treaty (where they might be financial exchanges) with global ruling classes to repair relations with white supremacy. The older idea, that Black lives matter, was not a means of negotiating for equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy or to seek patronage from institutional racism and its imperial politicians.

What type of consciousness would be raised if in Guyana and the Caribbean, we were reminded today of not 1833, but 1973, the year of the multi-racial occupation of the newly nationalized sugar lands by Forbes Burnham? Or the rebellions of the Black bauxite workers against Black trade union officialdom and Black management the years before and after? In order for there to be new contemporary political ruptures we must have philosophical and historical touchstones, memories of events the last generation left incomplete, that correspond roughly to our own lived experiences.

Guyana and the Caribbean, of the Caribbean New Left generation, was significantly a forerunner of what in recent years has been termed “occupy.” In Guyana in 1973, before Rodney returned, Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese toilers expressed plentiful wisdom to directly govern in the shadow of Burnham’s state power. Rodney became a coalescing voice of an insurgent movement of toilers of color from below.

How will Guyanese independence celebrations remember these obscure personalities? They cannot officially orchestrate such a cultural representation. It would leave their regime tottering. Consistent with the legacy of Rodney, this reveals what are the limits of thin discourses on identity.

Occupy unfortunately did not take off widely in the Caribbean in recent years because the insurgent heritage of those still alive (and those who made careers degrading them) was not widely disseminated. Instead the Caribbean in recent years has been burdened by a tendency toward crafting “Whig” histories as “radical” histories.

Whig history is not about white judicial hair pieces or the heritage of Anglo-American political thought. Rather, it is a type of narrative that a nation tells about its history claiming a long admirable evolution of constitutional government that minimizes all the people’s uprisings that shaped its relative accountability. Guyana and the WRCOI will strive to accomplish this with Rodney. It is similar to placing Barack Obama on the cover of an African American History textbook and listing all the U.S. presidents in an appendix along with Constitutional documents. Whig history legitimizes and papers over all that were degraded, brutalized, and killed for a pageant of pride in those responsible for bankrupt institutions that nevertheless are increasingly inclusive.

The most important legacy of Walter Rodney, and the Caribbean New Left (1968-1983) generation that he was a part, was that Rodney publicly asked which social class leads the national liberation struggle? Yet also the best of that generation had decided that “Black Power” and “national independence” meant little if this did not mean power to the common people -- even where people of color had already ascended to official government posts.

In 1968 in Jamaica, and 1979-1980 in Guyana, Walter Rodney asked Black people to choose between the authority of Black led government above society and the creative potential of ordinary Black people below society.

Rodney’s grasp of what power to the common people looked like may have been incomplete. He may have been emerging out of an anti-colonial period that was still finishing up the struggle of proving that the measure of people of color’s humanity was it could hold and seize whatever forms of power Europeans had previously kept exclusively and denied them. However, the critique of white power, did not always question all hierarchies, or propose the designing of a new society.

Many of the Caribbean New Left, more obscure than Rodney, advocated anti-racist perspectives that argued for the abolition of professional classes as the embodiment of culture and government in nations and communities increasingly led and managed by people of color. Without this challenge, the designing of a new society and insisting on new forms of freedom and self-reliance, Rodney may continue to represent an ambiguous sign of Black power, where there is a place for all (the insurgent rebel and the professional who stays silent as the former is vanquished) at the rendezvous of victory.

Dr. Matthew Quest is a historian of the intellectual legacies of C.L.R. James and the editor of Joseph Edwards's Workers' Self-Management in the Caribbean (2014).

Walter Rodney, 'Marxism and African Liberation': Speech by Walter Rodney At Queen's College, New York, USA in 1975

Walter Rodney

Marxism and African Liberation

Speech by Walter Rodney At Queen's College, New York, USA in 1975

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Written:1975
First Published: 1975
Source: From Yes to Marxism!, People's Progressive Party, Georgetown, Guyana, 1986
Translated:Unknown
Transcription/Markup:Susan Campbell, Steve Palmer
Proofread:Unknown
Copyleft:Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons License.

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First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate. When one is asked to speak on the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this particular time, one is being asked to involve oneself in an 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 observations, it 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 discussion.

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 just drop from the sky. There 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 rationalise the system which is collapsing. Hence the need to search for new directions, and quite clearly, Marxism, Scientific Socialism poses itself 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 raised before 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. Its relevance to Latin America was debated by Latin Americans. Individuals have long debated the relevance of 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 society or to the society's 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 this 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, in a very brief answer, I would suggest that what is common to the application of the question is first of all, 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 that people ask the question because of their own bourgeois framework. 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. And 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 part of the world, that is, the English-speaking part of the world, because the Anglo-American tradition is one of intense hostility, philosophically speaking, towards Marxism, a hostility that manifests itself in a peculiar way. It 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 glories in one's ignorance of the position.

It is rather difficult to seriously address the question of 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, it 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. It is almost an unanswerable question; and I think in all modesty, that for those of us who came 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.

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, 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; 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.

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 a rather truncated presentation of Marxism, inevitably oversimplifying, but nevertheless necessary in the context of limited time I would suggest that, one of the real bases of Marxist thought is that it starts from a. perspective 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 rooted itself in the material conditions and in 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 humanised 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 primate's and the rest of life.

What does 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 as 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. Oh, naturally enough we will have to deal with concepts and with the force of consciousness, which is a very powerful force and one that 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 on 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 concentrated 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 majority of their literature concerns this question.

But, as I said when I referred to 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 is itself an ideology about Western Europe, about capitalism in the 19th century and 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 recognising that the methodology can be applied, must be applied to different times to different places.

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 first major thesis of the young Lenin 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 apply them 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 has given way to imperialism. So Lenin had to deal with that 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 tse Tung 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 titled The Weapon of Theory, if I recall correctly, one of his most important essays; began by making 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's 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 hasn't 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 phenomenon 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, at the various modes of production, social formations, cultural formations which arose historically and the direction in which the society was tending.

In many respects, when we ask the question today 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 utilised, internalised, 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 to the 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 on 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 was already universalised itself, is somehow 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 centralise or keep central the concept of relevance, we must ask ourselves questions about 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 critiquing that capitalist system. He did [so] more effectively than any bourgeois writer, and if we want to understand the world in which we live, which is the world dominated by capitalism then we must understand the

12centre of that system, the motor within that system, the types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production. So that is yet another factor.

Marxism as Revolutionary Ideology

My second consideration after methodology, (and I had originally suggested that there were two basic things, and one was the 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 in the rise of capitalist society that conditions were created for the development of socialist ideas. Out of the diverse and unsystematised 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 is and 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 equivalent, without looking at the class base and without looking at 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 utilised 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 nor socialist, but is anticapitalist, 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 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 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 on 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 he was trying to straddle two worlds simultaneously - 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 was 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. With bourgeois thought, because of its whimsical nature, and because of the way in which it prompts eccentrics, you can have any road, because, after all, when you are not going any place you can choose any road!

So 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 had merely embraced another manifestation of that which they themselves had suggested that they were confronting at the outset.

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 tricksters who are attempting to hoodwink the majority of the population. I don't think they're out to develop socialism. I don't think they're out to develop anything that addresses itself to the interest 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 this 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 contradictions were fundamental.

For years Nkrumah went along with this mish-mash of philosophy which took some socialist premises but which he refused to pursue to their logical conclusion - 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,; an 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, there are classes in Africa. Yes, the petty bourgeoisie is a class with interests fundamentally opposed to workers and peasants in Africa. Yes, the class interest of the petty bourgeoisie are the same or at least are tied in with the class interest 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, at bringing victory and emancipation to the working peoples, the producers of Africa, we will have, to grapple with that ideology, which first of all recognises and challenges the existence of exploiting and oppressing classes.

It is a very important historical document. It is the closest that Nkrumah comes to a self-critique. It is the record of a genuine nationalist, an 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 of the boundaries of his own society and he was afraid of its cultural implications.

This 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!" 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, they are 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 be applied with sensitivity. It must be applied with a thorough grasp of the internal realities of a given society.

Marxism comes to the world as an 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 obviously interwoven, 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 scrutinise 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 ongoing social product which has to be adapted to their own society.

One finds that in looking at 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 people of Africa or the peoples of the Caribbean any participation in liberal democracy.

The petty bourgeois cannot fulfil 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 Scientific Socialist perspective.

As Cabral said, "There may be revolutions which have had a revolutionary theory and which have failed. But there has certainly been no revolution which has succeeded without a revolutionary theory".