From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sun Mar 05 2006 - 22:55:34 EST
re: the Walter Rodney thread; Legassick has
written some very important work on formally
unfree labour
Silences and voices: a review of Jacques
Depelchin's, Silences in African History: between
the syndromes of discovery and abolition.
By Professor Martin Legassick
History Department
University of the Western Cape
The last time I saw Jacques Depelchin I drove him
(together with Ibrahim Abdullah) around the
townships of Cape Town. We drove along a road
bordered by shacks in Khayelitsha and Jacques
commented "this is worse than anywhere I have
seen in Africa." Some of those shacks were the
so-called QQ section of Khayelitsha which, along
with a number of areas in the Cape Town
metropolis this last winter, rose in revolt at
the lack of delivery of services and housing,
putting up barricades of burning tyres to close
the road that Jacques and I had driven on, and
throwing their garbage across the road. A few
weeks later I held a workshop for youth in QQ
section. We talked about their situation, and
about capitalism, and I encouraged them to write
letters to the mayor of Cape Town, Nomaindia
Mfeketo, or to Thabo Mbeki. One youth, Yanga
Gregan Sawula wrote to Mbeki:
"I'm writing this letter in the pain and the poor
living that our, or even your, people in Site B
QQ section are living, situated, and making life
in. Our people are living in the danger zone
under the electric poles that can explode any
time. Some of us are in the squatter settlement
that are not even proper made, these houses are
ever flooded. We don't even have electricity,
toilets or running water.
"Mr President we are coming to you because our
ministers and mayors are not listening to our
complaints. We've tried by all means to talk to
them but they show no response.
We want serviced land with electricity, toilets
and running water. We are demanding this thing
because it is our right as the citizens of South
Africa to have a better house. You have promised
us a lot of things and know we demand houses so
if you are not responding to our complaints then
prepare for our action, what actions you will see
when it happened, and you know we are capable of
doing any thing. We want and demand HOUSES! QHINA
[power] !!!"
I will return later to the significance of this voice.
The book
I was put in mind of this voice by
Jacques Depelchin's book, Silences in African
History: between the syndromes of discovery and
abolition. It is a rich, erudite, wide-ranging,
profound, and thought-provoking book. As
practicing historians, it forces each one of us
to confront ourselves and our own practice of
historical writing. In searching for truth in
Yoruba thought according to Emmanuel Eze, "I put
myself at risk: I expose my preoccupation and
beliefs - in search of that which may well
challenge or reshape themŠ This is a challenge at
once threatening and exhilarating, for it is a
situation where who I am is as important as what
I know." (p. 31) These are words for all of us
historians. Historical writing, for Jacques,
involves ethics and morality and not just
'evidence'. This book, moreover, is not just
about African history as its title suggests, but
about world history. Indeed it is not just about
history, but about anthropology, economics,
politics, philosophy, literature. It challenges
our thinking on all the big questions - on
fascism and the Holocaust, on capitalism and
socialism. It provokes not just one's thought but
one's emotions, because it is a reasoned book
underpinned with strong emotions. Some of it -
not being a philosopher or a literary critic but
just a simple historian -- I found difficult to
grasp.
Let me begin my trying (at the risk of
over-simplification) to state the underlying
message of the book. It is a critique of the
dominant trends of 'Africanist history', produced
by outsiders to the continent, and with it, of
their economics and their anthropology.
(Fictionalised 'Africanist history' is in
contrast with a genuine history of Africa.)
"Relations of domination" asserts Depelchin,
"produce scientific disciplines which deal with
social reality from the perspective of the
dominant group" (p. 123) - not only in the
content of those disciplines, but in their form
and structure, their grammar, their rules of
evidence etc etc. And the relations of domination
shaping the history of the world and of Africa
have been, since the commencement of the Atlantic
slave trade, those of capitalism. "From
enslavement, through pacification campaigns, Red
Rubber (Morel, 1906) and its variations, colonial
occupations, the continuation of colonial rule by
other means through destabilization, and low
intensity warfare, the common thread has been the
promotion and defence, by any means necessary, of
one socio-economic system: capitalism." (p. 4)
What are the silences between the
syndromes of discovery and abolition? What are
the syndromes of discovery and abolition? Like
Wamba-dia-Wamba's account of the palaver (pp.
177-180) there is not one specific definition of
these, but a multi-layered one, developed through
the book. The 'syndrome of discovery' is
essentially the belief promoted by outsider
writers on Africa that they have 'discovered'
everything about Africa (the syndrome of
'explorers' back to Columbus now practiced
instead by academics), rather than recognizing
that what they have discovered has long been
known to Africans. "The central characteristic of
the syndrome of discoveryŠ is the conviction
among its carriers that knowledge as defined,
understood and practiced by them cannot be
modified by knowledge contained in the
'discovered' societiesŠ. Reproducers of the
syndrome will consciously and unconsciously
silence, prevent and cover up any facts which may
interfere with the notion that they are the only
possible discoverers." (pp. 2, 7, 144, etc)
The syndrome of abolition is closely linked. It
is the moral condemnation of slavery as if the
abolitionists had 'discovered' its immorality,
ignoring its condemnation from the beginning and
the revolt against it by its victims, the slaves.
The syndrome can be given a more generic meaning:
"the abolition of any degrading human condition
presented at first as a discovery not made by the
sufferers or the victims but by the degraders and
humiliators moved by remorse or something less
noble." (pp. 6, 8, 56, 72 etc). Thus, by
extension, the anti-colonialism of the
metropolitan 'Africanists' embodies the
abolitionist syndrome, since it was a belated
'discovery' of an exploitative immorality long
condemned by the colonized. Both syndromes at the
same time cover up the core relations of
exploitation and domination - those of
capitalism. Thus, "while it became acceptable to
condemn slavery, capitalism itself was never
questioned." (p. 56) - and the same for
colonialism. . "Nothing is 'discovered' until
such 'discovery' can become part of the arsenal
of the reproduction of the superiority of the
discoverers." (p. 12)
Just as the abolitionists believed the slaves had
no concept of freedom, but that it was
'discovered' and 'brought' by them, so the
colonialists and the 'Africanists' believed that
the idea of 'democracy' was brought to Africa
from the outside - ignoring all the evidence of
democratic practice in indigenous Africa. (pp.
60-1)
Both syndromes clearly create silences in
history, or, more accurately, perpetuate the
silences of the voices of the victims that have
already been created by repression - rather than
liberating the historical truth. (pp. 9-10) "The
very process of expansion of capitalism through
the Atlantic slave trade, followed by territorial
occupation by European powers, has been at the
root of the most systematic reproduction of that
denial [of African history]Š. Military violence
and economic interest were the twin pillars which
ensured permanent silenceŠ. Those who tried to
fight against it [the logic of capital
accumulation]Š were crushed by methods which were
aimed at instilling a paralyzing fear among the
survivors." (p. 14; cf pp. 9-10)
The exploitation of Africa, its domination by the
metropolitan powers, did not begin with
territorial occupation (as is asserted by
'Africanist historians') but with slavery. (84)
"By the time Europe took possession of colonial
territories in Africa one was not dealing with
two separate entities, economically speaking. By
then European economic wealth and political power
were, at least in part, the result of its
exploitation of the continent." (Here Depelchin
correctly follows Walter Rodney's How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, his contemporary at the
University of Dar es Salaam before his return to
the Caribbean and tragic assassination - and is
influenced also by the pioneering works of C.L.
R. James, Black Jacobins (1938) and Eric Williams
Capitalism and Slavery (1944)). The real history
of Africa is a part of the history of the
northern powers rise to dominance in the world -
a "crucial ingredient in the prosperity of the
West" (p. 77; cf p. 84) -- and this is elided
from the history of those powers as well as the
history of Africa as well as from development
economics. (pp. 18, 88, 96, 132) Though I believe
Rodney's book would have been more correctly
titled How European Capitalism Underdeveloped
Africa - to place responsibility squarely where
it belonged and not on those Europeans who did
not own the means of capitalist production.
Ideologically, with enslavement, the African
became a non-person with a non-history - a
'savage'. Then came colonialism, to 'civilise'
the savage without a history. The continued
denial of a history to Africa served to cover up
the crimes of enslavement and colonialism. (p.
85) The 'discovery' of African history by the
'Africanists' came only with the ending of
colonialism - in order to shape that history with
further cover-ups. (pp. 2, 12) The 'history'
subsequently written - by the Africanists - is
filled with silences. The achievements of 'Black
Athena" (Egypt) discovered by Cheikh Anta Diop
are denied to Africa and covered up (pp. 2-3,
6-7, 15, 59, 73, 93, 101). 'Pre-colonial'
history, for those such as Jan Vansina and John
Iliffe, is everything before European territorial
occupation - thus covering up the metropolitan
powers' exploitation of Africa during the slave
era. (pp. 142) The history of slavery and the
slave trade is sanitized by writers like Philip
Curtin, Joseph Miller and John Thornton - by
claims that the Islamic slave trade was worse
than that of the Atlantic, by claims that the
Atlantic slave trade was unprofitable, by claims
that Africans were implicated in their own
enslavement (failing to separate some rulers from
the slaves) etc. (pp. 93-6, 112, 116.)
"Resistance historiography", pioneered by Terence
Ranger, has focused merely on the facts of
resistance: "very little attention was devoted to
defining what was resisted" (pp. 4-5, 15) - thus
covering up again the presence of capitalist
exploitation.
Depelchin quotes Fanon's indictment of
'abolitionist' "humanism". "That same Europe
where they were never done talking of Man, and
where they never stopped proclaiming that they
were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today
we know with what sufferings humanity has paid
for every one of their triumphs of the mind."
(The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 312).
Depelchin then paraphrases Fanon with one of his
many elegant and telling aphorisms: "Europe went
everywhere in the name of humanity, but massacred
it wherever and whenever it ran into it." (p. 89)
Clifton Crais, writing of the British takeover of
the Cape Colony after 1806, similarly writes of
the "Janus face" of liberalism - of the
missionaries who favoured the abolition of
slavery but also on the whole welcomed the
conquest of the lands of the Xhosa and their
subordination as indentured labour, a paradox
identified more generally by Cooper and Stoler:
that, from the late 18th century, conquest,
exploitation and subjugation by European powers
coexisted and coincided with increasingly
powerful claims in political discourse to
universal principles as the basis for organizing
a polity. And the one missionary who opposed the
conquest of the Xhosa was to be subsequently
celebrated by the liberal historian W.M.
Macmillan as the "first and greatest
segregationist" - and the same W.M. Macmillan is
still regarded by white South African social
historians as a straightforward progressive
historian!
A model for Jacques is Patrice Lumumba who at the
ceremonies for the independence of the Congo
confronted an astonished King Baudouin's
"harmonious" treatment of the handover with an
impassioned spontaneous speech on the crimes of
colonialism: "it is too early to forget."
Depelchin compares Lumumba with Toussaint
L'Ouverture, leader of the Haitian slave revolt
from 1791 putting enlightenment philosophy into
practice (compared with the pure contemplation of
the philosophers themselves). Lumumba wanted a
rupture with colonialism, not a negotiated
continuity, he asserts (pp. 11, 80, 85-6, 156)
Depelchin compares Baudouin's views with those of
the historian Braudel who, writing in the era of
decolonisation, was trying to restore the French
sense of grandeur and magnanimity, as the
selfless civilisers who now desired to transform
their colonial subjects into equal partners and
to 'forgive and forget' the past. (pp. 78-80)
Braudel puts forward the ideas of
multiculturalism - of a 'plurality of
civilisations' - yet these will still be
"defined, ordered, ruled and studied from Europe
and for Europeans" As Depelchin points out, in
the current vogue of 'multi-culturalism' the
histories of the oppressed (Africans,
Afro-Americans, women, Native Americans) are
marginalized so that the dominant history is not
that of capitalism (silenced) but that of "the
triumph of the human spirit". (p. 88) Courses in
"Western civ". It reminds me of a book I read
upon first going to the United States in 1964, by
W.H. MacNeill, titled The Rise of the West. Like
Braudel, it purported to treat plural
civilizations and I was intrigued by its
presentation of the history of Chinese and Indian
civilization, and of the nomads of the Eurasian
steppes - but appalled by its final sections on
the triumph of "Western civilization."
Depelchin - following Ben Magubane's expose of
anthropology in the early 1970s (p. 109) - also
identifies the 'anthropological syndrome' -
denying history by freezing colonial people into
an abstract 'historical present' so they could be
looked at 'as they were before the European
conquest'. "Anthropology abstracts from history
by pretending that all that counts is the past
frozen into the present" he writes, in another
elegant aphorism. (pp. 58, 130) He also reminds
us that the earliest anthropology was physical
anthropology - the measurement of colonial skulls
to demonstrate they did not measure up to those
of the whites: "Once slaves were categorized as
not human, it was not difficult for any science
to approach Africans as objects." (p. 106)
Indeed, as he also reminds us, in the period of
the partition of Africa, 'specimens' of Africans
were put on display in the imperialist powers, in
circuses and even in a zoo in New York City. (pp.
165-7)
Depelchin's treatment of economics parallels that
of Marx - penetrating beneath the fetishisation
of commodification to the realities. He rightly
pours scorn on the fetishisation of measurement,
of numbers, at the expense of a qualitative
treatment of history - pointing out how 'numbers'
exclude the marginalized, women no less than
Africans. (pp. 116-120) He points out how the
concept of "development" has become the equally
paternalistic modern version of the civilizing
mission, combining the abolitionist and the
discovery syndromes. Thus, prior to the
'developers' Africans are supposed to have had no
notion of nor desire to improve their economic
condition. But just as it was Europeans who first
"discovered" and then "civilized" the "savages",
so development has "discovered" and will get rid
of "the poor." (pp. 128-9, 135)
For Depelchin, the elevation by
historians of the Holocaust to a unique
experience has also generated silences. Firstly,
it denies the 'low intensity genocidal' (p. 32)
experiences which were the prelude to fascism
which "came as the end product of centuries of
capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination
and racism - mainly exercised outside Europe" (p.
34) - including the near extermination of Native
Americans. Secondly, it has distracted attention
from such subsequent genocides as that in Rwanda,
where Depelchin (with many others) accuses the
United States of preventing timely UN
intervention to halt the genocide and accuses the
'Africanist' establishment of echoing that
apathy, and reducing the genocide to a spectacle.
(pp. 27, 36-37, 48). Moreover its presentation as
a unique experience which can 'never happen
again' numbs consciousness of the potential
greater genocide contained in the existence of
nuclear weapons, or for that matter in the
military horrors of US imperialism in Vietnam in
the 1960s and in Bush and Blair's genocidal war
in Iraq today. Contradictorily, but exhibiting
his dialectical method, Depelchin however praises
the silence of the barber regarding experience of
the Holocaust in Lanzmann's film Shoah, over the
mawkish sentimentality of Spielberg's Schindler's
List. (pp. 41-2)
The way out
Depelchin is not a positivist who believes the
historian is a neutral appraising an objective
world. He celebrates the insights of quantum
physics - that observation impinges on that which
is observed. (p. 121, 126) Atomic-level matter
shows only a tendency to exist in a definite
place at a definite time. At the same time
Depelchin shows his materialism in repudiating
the narcissistic self-indulgence of the
post-modernist approach: that history is merely
texts: "historians do not produce history. It is
already there, but given their profession -
discoverers of history? - they cannot but
continue to propagate the notion that it is they
who are the first producers of history." (p. 77)
That is all positive. Where I question Depelchin,
however, is in his apparent leaning towards
orality and performance as the sole way of
breaking out of the silences. What he writes on
the palaver as a "way of living democracy", his
account of Karen Barber's analysis of Yourba
'oriki', his stress on the production of history
as a creative act and hence constantly undergoing
change is all exciting. It is also true, as he
writes, that: "In a continent which has been
raided for slaves, then partitioned and raided
for its material wealth, objective histories will
continue to be incomplete as long as the impact
of those violating processes among the population
is ignored on the spurious grounds that it cannot
be documented." (p. 158) Hence the fact that
fiction - Sembene Ousmane's magnificent God's
Bits of Wood, or Toni Morrison's Beloved-- - can
tell us things about a railway strike in Senegal
and slavery, respectively, that 'factual history'
cannot.
But does this mean there is no place for written
texts based on the archives and oral texts. What
about Depelchin's own From the Congo Free State
to Zaire, 1885-1974? Does not that also break the
silences of 'Africanist history'?
Socialism
Depelchin rightly roots the problems of
our time, and the force that has shaped history
since the 16th century, as capitalism. For a
period, the Russian revolution appeared to
present an alternative way forward for humanity -
in the overthrow of capitalism. Now capitalism
has been restored in the Soviet Union, and in all
the other countries (save Cuba) that modeled
themselves on the Soviet Union. But what are the
lessons to be learnt from this experience.
Trotsky - someone whose thought has been
silenced not only by capitalist historians, but
also by those of the bureaucratic Stalinist
system which developed in the Soviet Union -
regarded the Russian revolution as a model for
the colonized world. Generalising its lessons as
those of 'permanent revolution", he explained
that socialist revolution did not have to take
place in the most 'developed' countries first.
The working class had become saddled with solving
the unfinished tasks of 'bourgeois-democratic'
revolution as well as those of socialist
revolution, through taking power in a democratic
way. But socialism could only be completed on a
world scale.
Depelchin writes that "Abolitionists were
for the abolition of slave labour, but not for
the abolition of the exploitation of labour by
capital, which is what the most radicalized
slaves fought for." (p. 63). Until the twentieth
century it was possible for slaves to achieve
this only through withdrawal from the global
system - along the lines of maroon communities,
or the revolution in Haiti. The Russian
revolution changed all that - although for
reasons there is no time to go into, its promise
was only fulfilled in distorted ways, in the
revolutions in China and many other countries
after the Second World War - including, by the
way, Mozambique and Angola in my view -
revolutions which ended capitalism but put in
their place not workers' democracy but
bureaucratic rule.
Depelchin explains the failure of the Soviet
Union in these terms: "The alternative attempts
at building socialism by borrowing from the
same-thinking arsenal (outcompete capitalism in
the production of commodities, and do it through
state decrees) could not but fail." (p. 76) Along
with this, Depelchin appears to oppose the
Marxist idea that the development of the
productive forces of society has a liberating
power. (pp. 77, 99). In Africa, he opposes to
this "what is central is the human being." (p.
144) Permit me to disagree with Depelchin on
these points. Yes, state decrees were
bureaucratic. But it is in my view capitalist
production of commodities (defined in Marx's
sense of exchange-values, produced through the
market) which today fetters - holds back -- the
development of the forces of production - thereby
ensuring both the impoverishment of the majority
of humanity, mass unemployment even in the
imperialist powers, and the uncertainty of booms
and slumps. The productive forces are not
comprised solely of machinery and so on - their
principal component is human beings, the working
class. To liberate the productive forces - and
ensure the greater production of use-values which
can eliminate poverty and eventually create
abundance for all - is the task of the working
class, through taking control of production and
building socialism.
Despite the ending of capitalism, state ownership
of production, and planning, what was built in
the Soviet Union was not socialism, because rule
was usurped from the working class by a
bureaucratic elite. Though initially the
productive forces were developed at breakneck
speed, in the end the relations of production in
the Soviet Union (the bureaucracy, the
national-state) equally fettered the development
of the forces of production. Socialism, in my
view, can only be developed on the basis of
workers' democracy and cannot be confined within
a single country. I return to this below.
South Africa
I first met Jacques in Dar es Salaam in
December 1975 at a conference on South Africa,
attended also by the late lamented Ruth First and
Harold Wolpe, and others. It was just after the
liberation of Mozambique and Angola, which were
big steps forward for the continent of Africa -
though while we were there the news came through
of the apartheid regime's first invasion of
Angola. It was just months before the Soweto
uprising. (My first and only previous visit to
Mozambique was in 1978, when Ruth First invited
me to come and teach at the Centre for African
Studies, which the ANC in fact blocked me from
doing.)
From 1976 onwards, with only momentary
pauses, the working class and youth were active
in mass struggle in the country through the
1980s. At the same time the apartheid regime -
like Reagan in Nicaragua - waged a vicious
genocidal proxy war against the non-capitalist
regimes in Mozambique and Angola through RENAMO
and UNITA. Then came the unbanning of the ANC,
SACP and PAC and the negotiations which resulted
in democratic elections and an ANC government.
Although I did not encounter Jacques in
South Africa until later, he had already attended
a Ruth First memorial symposium at the University
of the Western Cape in 1992. His paper, reprinted
in Silences, was very prescient. He wrote that
"The transfer of power will not necessarily mean
the transformation of deep rooted social and
economic processes." (p. 71) He could already see
at work the compromises of the 'abolitionist
syndrome' and the consequent propping up of
capitalism - and he criticized ex-Marxists like
Stephen Gelb, Michael Morris and Dave Hindson for
warning against "frightening the owners of
capital" and for acceptance of continued class
divisions in society. (pp. 53, 64-5)
The causes of the negotiated compromise,
in my view, were because of a stalemate of forces
resulting from the fact that the ANC had no
realistic strategy for overthrowing the state,
and was in fact ideologically holding back the
only force which could have achieved this, the
working class. Together with this, there was in
the early 1990s a huge increase in
state-sponsored vigilante violence against the
masses (mainly by the Inkatha Freedom Party) in
an attempt to terrorise them to accept compromise.
The consequences have been dismal. In
1996 the ANC government adopted the neo-liberal
GEAR economic policy, of cuts in the budget
deficit, privatization and trade liberalization.
A recent book by an economic adviser to the
presidency boasts that this was done to 'protect
South Africa's sovereignty' against the dangers
of IMF-World Bank intervention! Implement an
IMF-World Bank structural adjustment policy to
pre-empt them implementing it!!
Under GEAR, a million jobs were lost from the
formal sector of the economy, and over the first
ten years of democracy there is substantial
evidence not only that inequality has increased
but that the numbers of the impoverished and of
the unemployed has risen. On a realistic
definition, more than 40% of the economically
active population are unemployed, and amongst
youth and women the percentages are higher.
Despite the building of 1,5 million houses, the
number of those living in informal settlements
(shacks) has increased from 1,4 million to 2,4
million, according to the Housing Minister
herself. Thousands of people in shack settlements
either have no toilets at all or have to use the
infamous and undignified 'bucket system',
depositing nightsoil in buckets which are
collected periodically. In Cape Town there is a
backlog of 260, 000 houses, with some 16,000
joining the queue a year - yet the other day the
city's Director of Human Settlement Seth Maqetuka
declared it was possible to build only 8000
houses a year. What an admission of defeat!
The main beneficiaries of the last ten years have
been South Africa's big monopolies and banks -
Anglo American, Old Mutual, South African
Breweries - allowed to freely invest overseas for
the first time and taxed less than under
apartheid. Recently Barclays Bank has returned to
South Africa, buying up ABSA bank. There is a
court case against Barclays and other foreign
banks in New York for their role in propping up
apartheid - but the South African government is
taking an active role in opposing any
reparations. Banks in South Africa, by the way,
have a rate of profit "consistently higher than
that of major banks in most other parts of the
world."
The inequalities are becoming obscene. Wages of
employees as a percentage of GDP has fallen from
51% in 1993 to 45% in 2004 while profits have
increased from 25% to 30%. Between 2003 and 2004
alone the average gap between the remuneration of
executive directors and the wages of workers on
the average minimum rate across all sectors
increased from 111:1 to 150:1. The Oppenheimer's
wealth is estimated at R30 billion and the
Rupert's at R11,5 billion, but the black
beneficiaries of BEE are not far behind with
Patrice Motsepe (shares worth R3,5 billion) and
Tokyo Sexwale (shares worth R1,5 billion). Tokyo
Sexwale benefited by R140 million through a deal
with ABSA and Cyril Ramaphosa by R103 million
through a deal with Standard Bank, both in 2004.
The succession dispute currently tearing the ANC
apart is a red herring. Despite the fact that he
is backed by COSATU and the South African
Communist Party, Jacob Zuma offers no alternative
economic vision, and is by no means a 'friend of
the workers'. COSATU and the SACP instead of
pursuing this chimera should break from the
Tripartite Alliance with the ANC and launch a
mass workers' party with a programme for
democracy and socialism.
The way out: again
Depelchin, in his 1992 paper on South
Africa, written at the time of the capitalist
triumphalism of the "end of history", wrote that
"The submission to the rules dictated by capital
at the end of the twentieth century is probably
more total than it has ever been." (p. 54) But
what history is once again showing is that
working people oppressed and exploited by
capitalism will again and again seek the road of
struggle and change.
Despite the US-led occupation of Iraq - and
despite the dead end of Islamic fundamentalism,
which is in fact a response to the historic
twentieth century failure of Communist Parties in
the Islamic world to present a way forward -
there is hope again: in Latin America for
example. In Venzuela the Bolivarist movement led
by Hugo Chavez - who has won nine elections and
currently enjoys 70% popularity in the polls - is
being looked to from around the continent. Chavez
has declared: "There is a new logical alternative
to capitalism, which is no other than socialism,
and we are building our own socialist model
without emulating the ones from the past" and
"It's impossible for capitalism to achieve our
goals, nor is it possible to search for an
intermediate wayŠ I invite all Venezuelans to
march together on the path of socialism of the
new century."
The revolution in Venzuela still hangs in the
balance. Nationalisation of unproductive
industries, regulation of the banks is
proceeding. There is a movement for cogestion
(workers' control) which presages workers'
democracy. Workers' democracy, as Depelchin
points out in Silences (p. 66) is the question
dealt with by Lenin in State and Revolution - the
means of dismantling the capitalist state. (True
workers' democracy, in my view, is little
different from how Wamba-dia-Wamba characterises
the palaver. (cf pp. 177-8)) But let us remember
the fate of the Chilean revolution in 1973 - the
bloody US-sponsored coup of General Pinochet. The
"Hands of Venzuela" solidarity campaign which has
been taken up in the United States and Europe is
important to all the oppressed of the former
colonized world. And if the Venzuelan revolution
is consummated, it must become an example for
people to find their way to socialism world-wide.
Khayelitsha again
It is not only in Latin America that people are
moving into struggle. The worsening situation in
South Africa, described above, has also - as
pointed out at the start of this paper -
stimulated the development of social movements
outside the ANC. Against the spin doctors of the
ANC who are attempting both by repression and
ideological denial to silence these voices, it is
equally the task of the contemporary historian to
liberate and amplify them.
Let me then finish with another letter from QQ
section, Khayelitsha, from a school student, but
not the voice of book learning but of experience
gained from struggle:
"Dear Thabo Mbeki -- we demand development in QQ
section and decent housing for all and I don't
want capitalist GEAR policies. I don't want a
bucket system because it was meant to be
abolished in 1996 but it's still existing in SST
section in Town Two. Our local councillor
Makaleni don't give a damn about QQ section.
Mbeki you said you create jobs for all but there
is no such."
He concludes in the words that are also spoken at
all mass meetings of the social movements in
Khayelitsha:
"Phanzi the banks, phanzi! Phambili socialism forward! Smash capitalism smash!"
If liberating history is a way of advancing the
struggle for socialism, so equally the struggle
for socialism is the only lasting guarantee of
the liberation of history.
21/11/2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Mar 08 2006 - 00:00:01 EST