The Future of Socialism in Africa
Sklar, Richard L.
The Failure of Economic Statism In Africa, as elsewhere, the debacle of socialist thought can be attributed to intellectual as well as circumstantial causes. During the colonial era, and for...
...Consequently, those who formulate and implement free-market reform policies rarely reach out to the labor movement...
...Until the latter 1970s, many professing socialists in Africa believed fervently in collectivist strategies of capital accumulation...
...Despite the fact that ANC leaders and their advisors frequently advert to the nationalization of industry as a prospective element of economic policy by an ANC-controlled government, they also declare, with increasing frequency and evident sincerity, that socialistic methods would not be implemented at the expense of economic efficiency...
...The difference between them on the paramount issue of the day could not have been more pronounced: Chiluba, former chairman of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, stands for capitalism, multiparty electoral competition, and free trade unions...
...As in Zimbabwe, the lack of correspondence between official professions of political faith and actual practice inevitably undermined the credibility and legitimacy of national leaders...
...First, during the 1970s, the popular cultural/political movement known as "black consciousness" was often criticized by ANC commentators as a form of "racial chauvinism" because leaders of that movement were averse to collaboration with white opponents of the apartheid system...
...In most African countries, socialist intellectuals are respected by the labor movement...
...Specifically, exponential population growth and the escalation of prices for essential imports created needs for agricultural production that were far greater than collectivized and regimented labor could ever fulfill...
...Socialists are prominent as leaders and organizers of the predominantly black trade unions...
...hence, they resolved that industrial development would not be pursued at the expense of the peasantry...
...For its part, the Communist party also espouses pragmatic economic policies, but they are predicated on doctrinal faith in the future of SUMMER • 1992 • 401 Failure of Economic Statism its version of socialism...
...Socialist thinkers who combine ideas from these rival, yet complementary, traditions could recover some of their lost credibility while the theoreticians of capitalism are dizzy with success...
...Among them, thinkers in the socialist tradition bear a special obligation to advance the economic and moral merits of distributive justice as a principle of democratic public policy...
...Despite their legitimacy as associational interest groups in pluralist democracies, trade unions in all African countries are still compelled to fight tooth and nail for the basic rights of labor...
...During the colonial era, and for some years thereafter, socialist intellectuals in Africa had routinely identified capitalism as a barrier to social progress and an impediment to the distribution of a fair portion of the world's wealth to African people...
...If socialism has a future in Africa it is unrelated to the imperatives of economic development...
...Many blacks oppose privatization for reasons that are unrelated to socialist ideology...
...It emerges that no major political organization in South Africa today upholds democratic socialism as its ideal...
...it is in the rural areas that people must be able to find their material well-being and their satisfactions...
...some of them appear to believe that the time for separate political action will soon arrive...
...Their contributions to the abolition of apartheid and democratization have been second to no other segment of the liberation movement...
...Janet MacGaffey observes that "the real economies of African countries" are mixtures of formal, or recorded, and informal, unrecorded, economic activities...
...Whither socialism in the face of a capitalist revolution from below combined with national economic policies that favor entrepreneurship and foreign investment to the greatest possible degree...
...4 De Soto's formulation captures the reality of mass action in Africa today...
...The main external threat to free and vigorous trade unionism in Africa is posed by technocrats who believe that organized labor is the enemy of capitalist economic reform...
...Indeed, South African capitalism will probably expand and prosper as the main engine of economic growth for the vast Southern African region...
...In South Africa today, the independent and democratic trade union movement is the SUMMER • 1992 • 403 Failure of Economic Statism principal, if not the only, significant linkage between socialist thought and the practice of economic development...
...5 The World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (Washington, D.C., 1989...
...Within the Congress, Communists and non-Communists alike affirm the precept that democracy as a political goal takes precedence over "socialism," which they both identify as a more remote objective...
...its pursuit is incompatible with an efficient system of incentives to produce food and fiber for urban dwellers and sale abroad...
...Yet another lesson to be learned from Tanzania's experience grows out of the demonstrable incompatibility of democratic participation with the institution of a one-party state...
...It seemed to me that the glaring discrepancy between authoritative pronouncements of an official ideology and the actual practice of responsible officeholders produced cynicism among students at the university...
...For example, in Namibia, the nationwide strike in 1971 by cruelly exploited contract workers led to South Africa's concession of Namibia's right to determine its own political future...
...Moreover, the idea of nationalization is rarely mentioned without reference to two related issues: first of all, the excessively high concentration of stock ownership in South Africa—six conglomerates are reported to own more than 80 percent of the capitalized equity quoted on the Johannesburg stock exchange...
...In its Marxist-Leninist form, socialism, in Zimbabwe as elsewhere, was relevant only to the retention of power by the leaders of a dominant political party...
...Naturally, it has been difficult to enlist the support of free trade unions for such programs...
...The importance of Tanzania's experience with socialist thought and practice, for both Africa and the world at large, is greatly enhanced by the fact that its ideological credentials were not directly discredited by the debacle of MarxismLeninism in Europe...
...Their brave attempt to build rural socialism as an end in itself, which they sustained for the better part of two decades, represents the most significant such effort in modern history...
...Any attempt by communist intellectuals to launch a labor party, apart from the ANC, in South Africa would probably be politically suicidal...
...As a visiting professor at the University of Zimbabwe in 1984, I wondered about the espousal of doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism by President Robert Mugabe despite his government's effective use of capitalist institutions and methods of development...
...Barring a spectacular electoral triumph by either Leninist or racial socialists or an improbable combination of both, postapartheid South Africa may be expected to march in step with the rest of capitalist Africa...
...Its unprecedented rate of population growth, now 3.2 percent a year, imposes an immense burden on the region's forty-seven national economies...
...Invariably they require sacrifices by salary and wage earners in the regulated sectors of national economies...
...The second issue relates to proposals for privatization of existing state corporations, such as the Energy Supply Commission, the Iron and Steel Corporation, and the Arms Corporation...
...Black Consciousness had revived the spirit of "Africanism," the clarion call of a previous political generation for racial self-reliance...
...it was plainly unrelated to either economic development or any increase of meaningful freedom for the people...
...In some countries, there are historic ties between the major working class organizations and labor parties...
...The Communist party might have seized that opportunity in December 1991, but refused to do so...
...many of them also support the political objectives of the ANC and other political organizations...
...Second, during the early 1980s, the ANC repudiated the strategy of revolutionary trade unionism as an "ultra-leftist" deviation from its own, more complex and many-sided approach...
...Since they routinely reduce social issues to race-class formulations, I shall identify them as "racial socialists...
...Although socialism has not been a serious alternative to capitalism from the standpoint of economic efficiency, its survival in ideological form may signify the eventual evolution of contemporary capitalism and socialism jointly into a more advanced form of economic organization, one that remains to be discovered by social scientists...
...From that standpoint, subordination of the working class to the political leadership of a "bourgeois" party, such as the ANC, can only be a temporary condition...
...By the year 2020, the population of SubSaharan Africa will exceed one billion people, double its present size...
...The avowedly Marxist-Leninist regimes of Angola, Benin, Congo, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe had become receptive to the logic of capitalist development long before their leaders finally embraced multiparty democracy, in each case between SUMMER • 1992 • 399 Failure of Economic Statism 1989 and 1991...
...As shown by the example of Tanzania and many other countries, such reforms are indispensable...
...Increasingly, goods and services required to sustain life for these people and their families are being produced in the so-called informal or unregulated sectors of national economies...
...There is no valid excuse for Zambia's being worse off than its neighbor, Zimbabwe, which endured several years of warfare before the termination of white minority rule, and has no wealth-producing natural resource comparable to Zambia's great economic asset, a copper mining industry that was second to none among 404 • DISSENT Failure of Economic Statism copper exporting countries when Zambia became independent in 1964...
...By the latter 1970s, Tanzania had become dependent on foreign aid for some two-thirds of its domestic investment...
...One such observer, namely Dean E. McHenry, Jr., has recently suggested that many of the goals of socialism have become part and parcel of the national culture, and that "they are likely to affect the nature of Tanzanian society no matter what form its polity and economy take...
...During three postcolonial decades, there has been but one significant socialist experiment in Africa, namely that of Tanzania, which is virtually untainted by Marxism-Leninism...
...By the end of the 1980s, when Leninist one-party rule collapsed in Europe, its economic rationale for Africa had entirely disappeared...
...3 In Africa, as elsewhere, the real economy is primarily capitalist, regardless of the incumbent government's particular ideological preference...
...The Tanzanian experiment represents an attempt to build socialism in a society of rural dwellers with the expectation that it would remain predominantly rural and agricultural "for a long time to come...
...In addition to the Communist party, various other political groups in South Africa advocate socialistic programs...
...This principle, shared by unionists of Marxist and non-Marxist persuasion alike, has done more for the democratic credibility of socialism in South Africa than all the democratic protestations of doctrinaire socialists in the movement against apartheid...
...Some of them are anti-Stalinist communists, typically Trotskyists, who nonetheless combine Marxism with the maxim of non-European unity...
...It may be necessary to remind those who advocate democracy as a correlate of capitalism that capitalism without free trade unionism is incompatible with democracy...
...His original defense of a one-party state was predicated on the belief that its establishment would actually extend and strengthen democratic participation and choice under conditions obtaining in the aftermath of independence...
...For example, no planning agency is more deeply involved in African economic reform than the World Bank...
...Not only will a majority of African workers continue to earn their incomes in the "informal" and unregulated sectors of national and regional economies, but formal-sector firms also depend on these irregulars (informal-sector workers) of capitalist enterprise to buy their products and supply many of their immediate needs...
...On the other hand, trade unions, cooperative societies, and the media were tightly controlled by the regime...
...Today realists of all ideological persuasions acknowledge the existence of a symbiotic relationship between capitalism and democracy in Africa...
...The logical remedy for this condition is not government ownership but more widely dispersed private ownership...
...Yet influential socialists persisted in preaching about the evils of capitalism and the relative merits of statist socialism for promoting development despite compelling evidence to the contrary...
...Pending the balanced judgments of historians, students of development in present-day Africa need to formulate tentative conclusions for the immediate guidance of planners and public officials...
...While many members of the ANC do have pronounced socialist sympathies, the Congress, itself, is unequivocally nondoctrinaire in principle...
...Recently, in numerous African countries, from Benin and COte d'Ivoire in West Africa to Zambia in East-Central Africa, trade unions have made crucial contributions to successful campaigns for free elections...
...In the words of Hernando de Soto, reflecting on the experience of Peru, capitalism from below—manifest in the actions and ideas of poor people—is "the invisible revolution in the Third World...
...Today, it is not unusual for statisticians to estimate unemployment of the work force in most African states to be in the vicinity of 40 percent...
...All three are associated with a revolutionary doctrine known as "racial capitalism," which teaches that racism in South Africa cannot be abolished apart from the simultaneous abolition of capitalism...
...132-136...
...One recollection of my own may serve to recall that tedious refrain...
...Among these organizations, the South African Communist party (SACP) is foremost as a center for intellectuals who wish to relate socialist thought to practical politics...
...Rural socialism appears to be a utopian conception that leads to disaster and disillusionment...
...The importance of working-class struggles for constitutional government and democracy in Africa should be fully appreciated...
...The Place of Ujamaa in Tanzania's Future," paper delivered at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, St...
...The challenge of political reconstruction today confronts a generation of intellectuals for whom socialism is, at best, an ambiguous ideal...
...Unlike communists, most democratic socialists in today's world do not favor the creation of specifically labor parties to represent the political interests of workers...
...Indeed, the growing symbiotic relationship between formal-sector demand and informalsector supply is a fundamental fact of economic life in African countries...
...Obsolete theories of revolutionary class struggle and doctrinaire espousal of the necessity for choice between capitalism and socialism only obscure the realities of class collaboration and potentially liberating mixtures of capitalist and socialist thought...
...They are simply wary of white schemes to retain economic power by means of privatization now that political power is about to be shared...
...Alert to the pitfalls of racial populism, they strive doggedly to maintain their specifically socialist political identities...
...Their distrust of compromise, halfway measures, and gradual reform stems from the conviction of those associated with these groups that white supremacy is being renovated and re-established in new forms...
...Cogent studies of the Tanzanian experience indicate that peasant resistance to both collectivization and repugnant price regulation was largely responsible for the disappointing performance of agriculture...
...Three of them, namely the Azanian People's Organization, the PanAfricanist Congress, and the Cape Action League are conspicuously active in the political arena...
...Although Nyerere and his associates did intend to develop the country's industrial potential, they also valued agricultural work highly as a way of life for modern Africans...
...Dependence on the paternalistic donor community for basic needs became a permanent feature of national economic life...
...the work force will be more than twice as large as it is today...
...Urban dwellers will constitute nearly 50 percent of the total...
...Their opposition would probably dissolve in the face of evidence that privatization could free up public funds for expenditures on social services for the truly needy...
...The present disrepute of authoritarian versions of socialism affords a remarkable opportunity for socialists to break away from irrelevant dogmas that marginalize the contributions of socialist thought to economic development...
...Louis, Mo., Nov...
...His well-intentioned but inept regime, frozen in place by the conversion of Zambia into a one-party state in 1972, reduced a potentially prosperous country to impoverishment because Zambians were not free to vote for a change of course...
...Communists, generally, subscribe to the Marxist doctrine that a mature working class will tend to unite behind a political party dedicated to the cause of socialism...
...Leading deviationists were expelled from the Congress...
...However, the four-hundred-plus delegates voted decisively to reaffirm the party's Leninist orientation and to expunge the word "democratic" from a proposal to pursue the goal of a "democratic socialist society...
...3 Janet MacGaffey, "The Need for a New Approach to the Real Economies of African Countries," Beyond Autocracy in Africa, The Carter Center of Emory University (Atlanta, Ga.: 1989), pp...
...So long as they are not anticapitalist, they will be able to add principles of social democracy to the normally democratic policies of the trade unions...
...The great majority of them have also stood for internal union democracy and the independence of trade unions from external political control...
...But this is not the case in South Africa or, for that matter, anywhere else in Africa...
...Now that the ideals of rural socialism grow ever more remote from the realities of capitalistic economic reconstruction in Tanzania, the question of its legacy for the emergent social order is being pondered, mainly by 400 • DISSENT Failure of Economic Statism sympathetic intellectuals...
...Moreover, the African peasantries were emphatically more averse to collectivization than had been the case with peasantries in China and North Vietnam during the 1950s, when collectivization was accomplished in those countries...
...Their basic economic practices were ideologically indistinguishable from those of other African regimes, some of which espoused socialism while others were either candidly capitalist or noncommittal...
...The economic systems they fostered are demonstrably unsuitable for countries at early or intermediate stages of industrial development...
...The challenges of development in Sub-Saharan Africa are daunting...
...In short, socialist values for the future should be so formulated as to be congruent with the values of democracy...
...2 Dean E. McHenry, Jr., "Are Pragmatism and Vision Mutually Exclusive...
...Their ability to secure such rights (including the right to strike, recruit members without hindrance, and bargain collectively with employers) varies directly with the realism they manifest in relationships with business organizations and governmental authorities...
...These would include the following ideals: fairness in the distribution of both resources and wealth, reasonably equal opportunity for everyone to live in dignity and accomplish personal goals, and separation of private wealth from privileged access to public office and authority without detriment to the political rights of individuals...
...Although the terminology is essentially symbolic, rather than practical, it does indicate that the SACP cannot now be identified as a party of democratic socialism...
...On the one hand, Nyerere's regime was relatively liberal for a doctrinaire one-party state—for example, ideological tests for party membership, adopted in principle, were never fully implemented, and ideological purges of the party were scorned by Nyerere himself and prevented...
...Realistically, they acknowledge that wage and salary workers support various political causes and parties...
...By the late 1970s, however, a growing number of specialists and others who were informed about conditions in Africa had concluded that, in fact, the main obstacle to development was economic statism, not capitalism...
...Many Communists are known to question the durability of their party's organic linkage with the ANC...
...it became increasingly difficult for critics of the leadership to rise within the party...
...In Africa, trade unions have been in the forefront of struggles for democracy...
...In all such cases, the inevitable results have been intellectual confusion, political demoralization, and general disillusionment with socialist ideals...
...Similar observations would elicit even fewer objections in relation to the rest of Africa, where socialist intellectuals are less influential than they are in South Africa...
...For socialism to regain its lost credibility in Africa, and elsewhere in the world, its damaged intellectual foundations will have to be reconstructed on basic principles of social justice...
...From time to time, this perversion of both capitalism and socialism has been approximated in African countries, including Benin and Zambia, among others...
...In the name of socialism, the paternalistic government became a fetter on the forces of intellectual and cultural development as well as economic production...
...Whither socialism...
...However, mainstream racial socialists are more likely to compromise their beliefs in favor of populist reforms couched in anticapitalist rhetoric rather than formulate pragmatic/democratic socialist alternatives...
...Before its congress of December 1991, the SACP appeared to contemplate a fundamental ideological shift from Leninism to democratic socialism, in keeping with the revised views of its outgoing secretary general, Joe Slovo...
...The discrepancy between that reality and the official ethos of self-reliance took its toll on the regime's morale...
...African socialist regimes have failed to solve the problem of insufficient personal incentives to produce surplus wealth for public purposes...
...For example, in South Africa, black workers fought for, and won, the right to strike, organize, and have their unions registered as bargaining agents during the 1970s...
...A related lesson, one that arises from Tanzania's increasing need to import food and other products that could be produced just as well at home, is the probability that a socialist strategy of development for an agrarian society will result in that society's degrading dependence on foreign patrons...
...Such causes often include these: a free market for labor, free trade unions, free collective bargaining, internal union democracy, worker participation in the making of managerial-type decisions, and union representation on the boards of enterprises...
...To be sure, it was difficult for them to believe that professions of political faith by national leaders should be taken seriously...
...The sole rationale for socialism in Africa is a moral impulse toward social justice...
...As President Julius K. Nyerere declared in 1967, "It is therefore the villages which must be made into places where people live a good life...
...A potentially feasible, but politically retrograde, alternative to free trade unionism is dictatorship with capitalism in the name of socialism, a form of political economy exemplified today by China and its regional nemesis, Vietnam...
...However, the political institutions devised by Tanzanian socialists, ostensibly to promote democratic participation in the processes of government, do not appear to have had that effect or to have earned the approval of the people...
...Clearly, the circumstantial, or "objective," barriers to collectivist strategies of economic development were insuperable...
...1991...
...Survival at a tolerable standard of living for most people, without catastrophic episodes of social destruction, will depend on 402 • DISSENT Failure of Economic Statism the ability of Africans to produce goods and services for over a billion souls...
...Among these democratic episodes, none has been more dramatic than Frederick Chiluba's landslide victory over Kenneth Kaunda in the Zambian presidential election of October 1991...
...Since 1969, the Communist party has been an organic ally of the African National Congress (ANC), which means that all Communist party members also belong to the ANC and support its policies...
...For example, the Congress of South African Trade Unions supports the ANC politically, but it is fully autonomous in the sphere of industrial relations...
...4 Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (Harper & Row, 1989...
...These positions, reaffirmed by the ANC from time to time during the past two decades, have served to solidify the ANCSACP alliance...
...Paradoxically, the World Bank is deeply committed to the promotion of democracy in Africa on the ground that leading principles of democratic government, such as accountability of officials for their actions, public availability of basic information, and institutional pluralism, serve to facilitate economic development...
...Yet there is nary a word on organized labor in its current blueprint for African economic development, 5 and little, if anything, more in the entire series of reports on African development issued by the World Bank over the course of a decade...
...They cannot afford to be diverted from the course of pragmatic realism by sectarians...
...Meanwhile, the ANC has firmly rejected two proposed deviations from the liberationist line favored by communists for many years...
...This qualification, "not anticapitalist," is crucial to the survival of socialism as an invigorating current within the mainstream of African social thought...
...What are the lessons of Tanzania for students of socialism and development...
...One such conclusion is that rural socialism is unlikely to be supported by the peasantry...
...2 Be that as it may, we should still bear in mind that the initial goals of Nyerere's socialist program were political as well as economic and social...
...This approach has been adopted as a matter of course by most trade unionists in all parts of the world...
...In fact, the baton of socialist leadership in Africa has been passed from Tanzania to South Africa, where socialism is still ardently espoused by political organizations that have arrived at the brink of a historic victory in their struggle for equal political rights for all citizens...
...Thereafter, China's abandonment of collectivized agriculture in favor of a "household responsibility system," coupled with Vietnam's inexorable economic decline under classical Leninist leadership, stimulated growing doubts in Africa about the efficacy of socialist methods...
...The story of its failure, manifest in agricultural stagnation and a corresponding decline in the living standards of the peasantry, has been exhaustively chronicled by supporters and opponents alike...
...Notes 1 Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 273...
...Kaunda, whose dislike of capitalism is proverbial, believes in the subordination of organized labor to a sole legal party...
...In other words, purist theories of capitalism that disregard the basic rights of labor are just as unrealistic as the abstract theories of pure socialists who disparage the vital contributions of capitalists...
Vol. 39 • July 1992 • No. 3
