Thinking with African Socialism or Socialist Africa?

I first encountered Abdulrahman Babu’s ideas through How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the classic work of my intellectual hero Walter Rodney. In the postscript, Babu powerfully summed up both the problem of, and the solution to, African underdevelopment:

Almost without exception, all the ex-colonial countries have ignored the cardinal development demand; namely, that, to be really effective, the development process must begin by transforming the economy from its colonial, externally responsive structure, to one which is internally responsive. Where we went wrong is when we followed blindly the assumptions handed down to us by our exploiters… [E]ven if our own experience continues to disprove [these assumptions], we still adhere to [them] even more fanatically! The greatest need appears to be a process of mental de-colonization, since neither common sense nor sound economics, not even our own experience, is with us in this.

In his masterful text, African Socialism or Socialist Africa?, Babu provides a dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the dynamics propelling neocolonialism in Africa after flag independence. Babu wrote most of the book in the period between 1972 and 1978, while he was imprisoned by Julius Nyerere’s government on false charges of murdering Zanzibari President Abeid Karume, along with several other members of the Umma Party of Zanzibar.[1] The book arose from conversations with other prisoners about the causes of the worsening conditions in Africa. The discussions also focused on solutions, especially if a scientific socialist outlook was adopted in place of either the capitalist path or the Narodnik-like “socialistic experiments” taken up in Tanzania and elsewhere. (pp. ix, xv) Following a brief overview of the development of capitalism and the imperialist world-system, and an assessment of political economic developments at the time, Babu adeptly explains why scientific socialism is the best option for resolving the reigning contradictions that perpetuate imperialist domination.

As neocolonialism collides with earlier forms of direct colonial penetration and gunboat diplomacy, U.S. imperialism desperately—and violently—attempts to reverse its inevitable imperial decline. The problems of dependency, underdevelopment, and (neo-)colonialism, analyzed by Walter Rodney throughout How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and summed up by Babu, continue today. There is the increased military presence of the United States on the continent through the US Africa Command (AFRICOM ), which was activated at the end of the George W. Bush regime and extended throughout Barack Obama’s presidency. The continent is being destabilized for the extraction of strategic minerals, through, for example, the perpetuation of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the blackmailing of Zambia with life-saving AIDS and malaria aid. The Euro-American promotion of terrorism in the Sahel is undermining the security of the Alliance of Sahel States . Countries like Kenya and Chad are participating in the imperialist occupation of Haiti in exchange for equal treatment in the international community. And, the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Eswatini, and Ghana, among other countries are abetting U.S. human trafficking schemes by agreeing to accept deported migrants who are not their citizens.

Babu was not an economic reductionist, but he understood that self-determination is impossible without economic self-sufficiency. “Economic solutions stem from the very crucial question of liberation,” he wrote. “Liberation from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom… Thus the answer to the question about the aim of economic activity is fundamentally a political answer: freedom. (p. 46) As a Marxist, a revolutionary, a Pan-Africanist, and a steadfast believer in the possibility of an independent Africa, Babu understood the importance of Africa for Africans, African governments in the service of the African people, and African self-determination as the cornerstone of a world free of imperialism. African Socialism or Socialist Africa? offers a blueprint for radicals and revolutionaries today to analyze the correlation of forces that continue underdevelopment, to critique “leaders” who serve neocolonial masters, and to fight against Euro-American imperialism, starting with the development of socialist economies that serve the people. As such, it is required reading for anyone serious about African—and Global South—liberation.

In this review essay, I focus on three aspects of Babu’s analysis that are especially relevant for anti-imperialist analysis today: the relationship between socialism and self-determination, the role of the colonized petty bourgeoisie in perpetuating imperialism, and the relationship between aid and dependence.

Foreign Aid and Dependence

A central problematic aspect of post-independence African societies is the reliance on external prescriptions and foreign aid as the basis for economic policy. (pp. 5-7) The development “strategy” of the petty bourgeoisie is to accept grants and loans for projects that would further the interests and control of the international bourgeoisie instead of the wellbeing of the masses. Dependence on aid became the rationalization for accepting imperialism through the argument that continued access to foreign aid is vital to the country’s “national interests.” Attracting foreign aid is legitimated in moralistic terms and as a right, both of which are rooted in the idealist bourgeois outlook which “sees in the confrontation between poverty and private wealth, not a bitter and antagonistic contradiction which can be resolved only through continuous organized class struggle, but an absence of charity which can be rectified through good will.” Even the ostensibly radical position of the New International Economic Order suffers from the misconception that shaming imperialist countries into administering more aid was a pathway to development. (p. 134)

In contrast, Babu asserts that the aid racquet actually exacerbates underdevelopment because it is never disinterested. It ties African countries to imperialist economies, distorts developing economies and makes them more precarious, and integrates weaker countries into an international economic system predicated on their exploitation. (p. 45) In particular, reliance on foreign aid results in a dependent economy characterized by ongoing stagnation, terrible and declining living conditions for workers and peasants, insurmountable debt, and political independence in name only (pp. 119-120) All of these reduce African countries to neocolonial status. This imperialist method of providing aid to ensure dependence was in contradistinction to the provision of aid by socialist countries, which was “designed to develop, in as short a period as possible, independent national economies on the basis of the socialist principle of ‘objective economic complementarity.’” (p. x)

The Western model of foreign aid is a means of continuing the foundational rationale of colonial imperialism, which is to ensure that production and consumption in the colonies ultimately serves the enrichment of the metropole. The exploiters reason that by producing for the large markets of the core, peripheral nations will earn some income for the producers who, in turn, generate demand for goods and services and thus inaugurate the process of economic growth. The assumption that “growth” and “development” are synonymous, and that “growth” would continue to attract foreign investment, is erroneous. In reality, the interests and needs of the masses are discarded while a privileged minority benefit, and this abandonment of the majority leads to disunity that can be manipulated by the imperialists in their favor. The reliance on aid and foreign investment effectively leads to extraversion, and extraversion leads to mass suffering and political discontent. The class character of this scheme was obvious:

This is a perfect strategy for foreign-oriented neo-colonies, for it is not designed to create conditions of development, but only conditions for the production of annual growth figures to impress the multilateral organizations and the interests they serve. Our education was designed to produce educated elites whose function would be to administer our dependence, through the world market, on metropolitan economies and their financial institutions… the bourgeois idea of progress is limited and helps to confuse these leaders further. If, in the course of administering our dependency, a handful of people accumulate wealth at the expense of the masses, this is considered to be progress, even if in the meantime prisons go on filling up with potential opponents and social contradictions continue to deepen and threaten the very stability which made the system work for nearly two decades of independence. (p. 130)

Such an arrangement facilitates the expropriation of the surplus produced by workers and peasants by the very aid donors and foreign “partners” who are supposed to be supporting development.

The Petty Bourgeoisie and the Persistence of Imperialism

The aid problem is inextricable from the problem of the neocolonial petty bourgeoisie. Babu offers a penetrating assessment of why this class is not fitted to resolve dependency and underdevelopment in African societies. This class presents a conundrum in post-independence societies. On the one hand, because an endogenous capitalist class is generally lacking, the petty bourgeoisie became the most powerful due to their access to education, technical skill, and strategic positioning between the international ruling classes and the masses. They “control the commanding heights of the entire political and economic life of Africa.” On the other hand, because this group is educated for subservience, they lack the capacity to organize for revolutionary change, become more isolated from the people as they enmesh in state power, and often fetishize looking backward at “tradition” instead of building the future. The function of this tiny class is to manage the interests of the metropole, thus prolonging dependency. (p. 3) As Babu argues, “the political leadership in Africa is without exception a product of the bourgeoisie; it has assimilated its culture through education and its values and outlook have become our own.” This is notwithstanding the fact that these leaders lack an endogenous capitalist base. (p. 23) He elaborates their character thus:

As we have seen, most of our leaders, being basically petty-bourgeois and ideologically profoundly influenced by bourgeois education, and to ignore reality if it does not fit their idealized wishes, which are ambivalent because of the ambivalent class position they occupy. As they gradually identify their class interest with that of their foreign bourgeois backers, they slowly lose the ‘common touch’ which originally helped to sustain them as political leaders… Moreover, as the leaders lose any sense of the true realities of the African situation owing to their slowly evolving objective class interest, independent of their will or sentiment, they are more and more isolated from the masses and lose even the little influence that they enjoyed earlier. (p. 131)

This group, which takes on the duplicity of bourgeois ideology, is thus myopic, manipulative, and primarily focused on safeguarding their own privileges by “exploiting tribalism” internally and adapting a policy of “outwardly opposing imperialism to hoodwink the people, while actually cooperating in exploiting the masses of Africa.” (p. 5).

The bourgeois orientation of these governments supported the adaptation of a repressive approach, from menacing workers to launching military coups, to convey their fitness to manage international capital while enriching themselves in the process. (p. 49) Whether the government was conservative or progressive in scope, all were willing to create climates attractive to foreign investment by suppressing the freedom of workers, either through parliamentary acts, direct violence, or both. (p. 75) A penchant for authoritarian management of capital disguised as political rule was often complemented by the adaptation of a “traditionalist” view to mask class antagonism and present the latter as alien to African societies. By “judiciously grafting new aspirations to old traditions,” these leaders were actually peddling petty bourgeois metaphysics and a subjective outlook that presented an egalitarian, good, and harmonious African past as antithetical to “foreign” ideas like scientific socialism, economic planning, and class struggle. (pp. 55-57) In short, by presenting pre-colonial forms of communitarianism as akin, or even superior, to socialism, they confused a “democracy of poverty” for the “democracy of plenty” that was possible only under scientific socialist development. As Babu explained,

If those early forms of social organization contained elements of democracy, it was the democracy of that particular time, totally unfitted to the democratic practice of man in the present epoch. To say that an African can learn democracy simply by looking backward to see how great-grandparents behaved is not only meaningless but downright reactionary. As an economy develops, new socio-economic intuitions also develop with it and the people’s outlook and aspirations undergo changes… (p. 59)

The experience of the African working class in the era after flag independence, including deteriorating material conditions, increased political instability, and the durability of colonial social relations, illuminates the difference between national liberation and class struggle. National liberation unites nations and classes to forge a common identity and oust foreign rule. Class struggle, on the other hand, the requires an alliance of workers, peasants, and the sector of the petit-bourgeoisie willing to commit class suicide to crush internal forces of oppression and exploitation and the alien capitalists funding them. (p. 103) Therefore, for Babu, decolonization must swiftly morph into the development of the workers and peasants into an empowered anti-imperialist class that ushers in socialist transformation. In other words, the class-conscious African masses are the force that can usher in a better future under scientific socialism.

Socialism and Self-Determination

Perhaps the most important theme in African Socialism and Socialist Africa? is that neither capitalism nor a “third way” can transform backward and dependent economies. Independent capitalist social relations did not develop historically in most parts of Africa. Its integration into the international capitalist economy was, from the outset, extraverted and geared toward the production and consumption needs of Europe, and later North America. (p. 61) In other words, relations of dependency and underdevelopment are constitutive of Africa’s position in the capitalist world-system, so capitalism cannot be the source of self-determination and autonomous development. In fact, the opposite is true: “Since we have not developed a capitalism of our own,” Babu contended, “we suffer from the ills of world capitalism, from the receiving end. Any crisis in capitalist Europe is immediately exported to Africa as a result of our appendage relationship and also because our capitalism is American/European capitalism, not African capitalism.” Further, “most African countries can be described as being in a state of ‘simple reproduction’—the kind of production which was common before capitalism became a predominate mode of production.” (p. 64) While African countries bear the brunt of the “busts” of capitalism given the reduction of their economies to the export of raw materials, they enjoy few of the benefits during “boom” periods, and their role as shock absorbers actually allows the system to stagger along despite increasingly intense crises. (p. 84) Even worse, the burdens fall directly on African workers and especially peasants. (p. 94)

What is required, then, is industrialization through first developing heavy industry, followed by the development of the light industry sector (consumer and producer industries). This type of industrialization, Babu argues, would resolve the fundamental contradictions of neocolonial African economies, namely between the productive forces and relations of production, consumption and production, industry and agriculture, large-scale and small-scale production, labor-intensive and capital-intensive projects, and urban and rural development. (p. 151) Babu maintains that endogenous industrialization is the key to liberation from “vagaries of the world market, from natural hazards such as floods and droughts, and from foreign creditors.” (p. 47) Relatedly, a planned economy based on the principles of scientific socialism, achieved through class struggle waged by the African masses, would eliminate the continent’s “feudal relationship with imperialism.” (pp. 63-64) He cites countries like China, Vietnam, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as examples of countries that made phenomenal economic and social transformation—with industrial and technical assistance from socialist countries—by developing basic industries like steel mills and industrial plants and consumer industries, and by transforming their semi-feudal agriculture into large-scale state and cooperative farms. Significantly, human transformation accompanied this economic evolution, with the people heightening their skill and world outlook. “A new revolutionary class emerged as a powerful and creative force in the social system of these countries,” Baby writes. “This was the proletariat, the industrial working class, on whose shoulders rested the task of national economic construction.” (p. x) While Babu was writing in the 1970s, his assessment of what is required for development independent from Western imposition remains relevant, even in the context of a globalized economy.

Such industrialization is not possible through a “third way” between capitalism and socialism that can transform Africa’s “qualitative weakness into a quantitative force.” (p. 67) What Babu calls “sham socialism” is merely platitudes and wishful thinking that seeks to bypass class struggle—and therefore to evade the resolution of imperialist contradiction. As more countries gained flag independence, some reasoned that to protect their own “national interests” they could not clash with the global superpowers and therefore should adopt an “independent” road to development. Accommodating both capitalist and socialist interests, the argument went, would allow the smaller and weaker nations to play the big powers off each other and to wield diplomacy to their advantage. (p. 13) The ultimate result, according to Babu, has been a “practical compromise with exploitation.” As well, leaders like Kenneth Kaunda and Kwame Nkrumah (prior to his ouster in 1966) championed a type of state capitalism, that amounts to little more than “exploitation of the masses in joint enterprises and partnerships with multinational corporations which have led to our chronic underdevelopment.” (pp. 65-66) Ultimately, anything short of socialist transformation means maintaining a bourgeois orientation and remaining a junior partner in the capitalist world-economy.

Babu attributes the belief in capitalism or a “third way” to the failure to accurately understand the nature of imperialism. At the time he was writing, this resulted in an incomplete and incorrect assessment of the postwar situation. Idealist “sloganeering” about liberation masks the ineffectiveness of a leadership class that is more concerned about preserving their power than uplifting the masses. Relatedly, the failure to understand the postwar period as the epoch of proletarian socialist revolution in which the imperialist countries’ struggle for survival necessarily worsens the conditions of weaker states, has resulted in reactionary, inconsistent responses to world events. This is largely due to the petty bourgeois-outlook of those in power, who consistently confused harmful policies with good ones and friends with foes, such that “in the end, even the declared objective of our foreign policy, the total liberation of Africa, [began] to sound unconvincing.” (pp. 112-113)

Conclusion

African Socialism or Socialist Africa? concludes with the statement, “There is no third or middle way.” These words are a provocation for our current reality in which the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions are embattled, existential wars for national liberation in Southwest Asia are ushering in a new balance of power, and China’s economic dominance is steadily delivering the death knell for Euro-American imperialism. On the one hand, Babu was essentially correct: compromising with U.S. imperialism has led to sanctions, military intervention, and regime change throughout the Global South, while direct confrontation—from the Iranian offensive with the Strait of Hormuz to China calling the U.S.’s bluff on tariffs—has proven the global hegemon is a paper tiger. On the other hand, the immediate terms of struggle may not be capitalist subjection versus socialist transformation, but rather between imperialist domination and anti-imperialist fightback in all its forms.

Charisse Burden-Stelly is a member of AISC.

Notes

[1] The Future that Works, pp. xii-xiii