The Future of Socialism in Africa: Comments
Bewitch, Bogdan
It may seem churlish or nitpicking to write a critical comment on "The Future of Socialism in Africa" — especially since I agree with most of Richard L. Sklar's admirable article. He is not only...
...After all, these 406 • DISSENT Failure of Economic Statism regimes also insisted that they were "democratic...
...Some were activated by the radical, Marxistinspired Pan-Africanism found in the writings of George Padmore and C.L.R...
...Some were SUMMER • 1992 • 405 Failure of Economic Statism products of the London School of Economics—an institution that is responsible for more third world "socialist" experiments than is generally recognized...
...No such claim was made by most African regimes calling themselves socialist...
...Little was left for infrastructure, education and social services, let alone job creation...
...Rather it is a legitimate heir of the great democratic revolutions...
...Within a few years this country went from being a Soviet strategic stronghold poised to close the Red Sea or to expand toward Ethiopia, Kenya, or even Sudan, to being a firm, reliable American ally, worthy of aid...
...The model didn't cater to the interests of the tiny industrial working classes...
...all were urgently preoccupied by poverty, then called underdevelopment...
...These twin parasites, the swollen city and the expensive government-military establishment, have become an enormous burden that will be difficult to remove or transform...
...And still others came from left Catholic or Protestant traditions...
...Some of them accepted Soviet advisers and arms, but over and again this has been shown to be a non-ideological matter...
...Obviously, such an assault on the countryside and the peasantry made combining democracy with development impossible...
...The message of that all-too-influential book was quite simple: to achieve a developmental breakthrough, all economic resources had to be concentrated in the hands of the modernizing state...
...Take the case of Somalia, as seen through cold war categories...
...The intellectual elites who came to power in Africa, often in alliance with the military, in the name of "socialism" had diverse inspirations...
...Yet whatever these governments have been and whatever they will be in the foreseeable future has nothing to do with anything resembling the socialist tradition—Marxist or non-Marxist...
...In fact, their sources of inspiration were quite varied...
...My point should now be obvious: it is mistaken to call these regimes socialist...
...The consequence, not surprisingly, was a catastrophic fall in agricultural production and an ever-increasing dependence on outside aid...
...They inaugurated continual expansions of the state, which, in turn, required increasing extraction of resources from their societies in order to cover the costs of an ever expanding government bureaucracy that provided jobs for members of the politocracy and their clients...
...Socialism is not the linear descendant of the Incas or hydrolic Oriental despotisms...
...Living standards fell, and skewed centralized development generated a monstrous growth of parasitical cities with no economic functions, but needing to be fed...
...On the contrary: a statist and antidemocratic model was pursued...
...He is not only right on the mark, but he is often so without being obvious...
...But the particular name is not important so long as the term makes clear that these regimes were based on the power of political classes that, by controlling the state and the army, controlled the economy and society...
...Yet there is one important point that is not evident—and is problematic—in his analysis, and that concerns his use of the word "socialism...
...This is not a matter of praise or blame, for the simple fact is that these were societies with no basis for socialist experiments, at least as socialism was expounded by its major thinkers...
...Socialism and Marxism, insofar as they were represented by significant movements, were born in the nineteenth century as the radical social and egalitarian wing of revolutionary democracy...
...They can only be fed by a countryside that now needs to be painfully rebuilt...
...Now, call such a system whatever you like, but it has nothing in common with any known socialist tradition...
...Even Stalin—to whom I would also refuse the title "socialist" —at least claimed to rule in the name of the industrial proletariat...
...It is likely that populist politocracies will develop a new political language, increasingly shedding whatever is left of their claims to be part of the socialist tradition...
...James...
...Or with Lenin and Trotsky, for that matter...
...They had more in common with the Chartists in England than with the collectivist, scientistic utopias of Saint-Simon...
...Trying to play cold war superpowers off each other to obtain the maximum for one's country was a minor political art form throughout the third world, and especially in Africa between the 1960s and 1980s...
...And all this made, as I've mentioned, foreign aid and loans indispensable...
...In primarily agrarian societies, this meant the relentless extraction of surpluses from the countryside and the peasantry in favor of the cities and industry...
...Practically speaking, this demanded war on the independent peasantry, something pursued in a variety of ways, including wholesale collectivization in some places and concentrating peasants in new villages and settlements in others...
...All with no visible change in personnel or style of government...
...It has nothing in common with Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Luxemburg...
...Some were indeed influenced by Marxism or communism as a result of stays in Paris or London—or even the United States—as well as Moscow...
...These regimes were populist in their demagogy, and their populism often entailed—as it does elsewhere—a passionate assertion of tribal or national identity as a substitute for democracy and the slow building of civil society...
...By "politocracy" I mean a class that dominates the economy and society by means of its control of a state that seeks, directly, to control the economy and society...
...If it has ambivalent parentage, it is to be found in Babeuf and the enrages of the French revolution, not in Sidney and Beatrice Webb's bloodless socialworkerlike condescension toward the poor and disenfranchised...
...If there was a Bible in the 1960s, it was Paul Baran's Political Economy of Growth...
...In practice, the new postcolonial elites were increasingly preoccupied with fashioning an effective state apparatus to replace the wobbly colonial administrative structures they inherited...
...That is why it will not do to classify as socialist African, or for that matter any other, repressive politocratic regimes...
...And, of course, the newly developing and swelling armed forces had to be paid for...
...The nature of the future language is unclear, but it may well be a new type of nationalism and the assertion that there is a unique national path for African countries...
...It had to be because the war was against the vast majority of the population, which was rural...
...In an era of limits, in which international aid is limited, this does not bode well for democratic prospects...
...Most were not inspired by MarxistLeninist models, and graduates of Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University didn't play all that decisive a role in determining the paths taken by African countries...
...It rested on the new political and military class or the politocracy...
...I would classify the African "socialist" regimes more accurately as "populist politocracies...
...None were particularly concerned with democracy...
...Consequently, for all the calls to "mobilization," and for all the battles against the countryside, little genuine development took place...
...It is not an isolated example...
...Would you call them democracies...
...Most common was fixing prices of agricultural produce impossibly low so as to provide cheap food for the cities...
...Many authoritarian one-party regimes in subSaharan Africa claimed, in one way or another, to be "socialist...
Vol. 39 • July 1992 • No. 3
