Marxisms in the 21st Century. John Saul
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influence in Africa as well as Africa’s influence on Marxism. Yet Africa’s engagement with Marxism is significant and provides important lessons for the twenty-first century (Glaser and Walker 2010).
Glaser takes up this challenge and explores Marxism in Africa, a theme that Burawoy situates in the second wave of Marxism, by developing ‘seven theses’ on African Marxism. While Marxist–Leninist governance was a failure on the African continent, Glaser shows that important lessons can be drawn for contemporary politics seeking more egalitarian and democratic outcomes. He thus offers seven theses about Africa’s Marxist–Leninist governments and movements: (i) there was no clear difference between the ‘radicalism’ of Marxist–Leninist regimes and the ‘African socialist’ ones; (ii) there was no clear difference of Marxist commitment between regimes that came to power via military coups and those that came to power through guerilla war; (iii) while Marxism–Leninism was culturally alien to Africa it was brought to Africa via cultural outsiders located in the colonies and ex-colonies themselves; (iv) there emerged a distinctive African Marxist–Leninist tradition; (v) the failure of Marxist–Leninist regimes was above all ‘a product of flawed domestic choices’; (vi) the Marxist–Leninist slide into authoritarianism was the product of a flawed theory of democracy; and (vii) Marxism’s future in progressive politics depends on its place as one ideological current among others.
Thus there was a distinctive contribution to Marxism, largely authoritarian in its practices, that was coming out of Africa. Whereas socialist movements acknowledged the importance of popular participation and participatory democracy, the vanguard style of party organisation stymied local energies in their efforts to play an active role in society. Indeed, there was very little effort to entrench post-independence democratic practices and challenges to the ruling party were rarely, if ever, tolerated. Not without irony, the turn to representative democracy in the 1990s corresponded with a shift to pro-capitalist projects, neoliberal economic policies and a complete abandonment of socialist projects. Glaser essentially provides a new and powerful reading of engagement with Marxism in Africa and draws important lessons from this history.
Also drawing lessons from Marxism in Africa, Saul takes the discussion to two particular cases – Tanzania and Mozambique – and asks whether these experiences have anything to teach us today, especially in South Africa. Saul homes in on the choices made by the African National Congress (ANC) in its post-apartheid nation-building project and argues that it decidedly chose a capitalist route to development over a socialist one. Drawing on the experience in Tanzania, he problematises the way in which leadership was invoked, noting that South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment entrepreneurial leadership is also deeply problematic. He argues that the problem of leadership is ‘one of the most difficult challenges facing those who would create a politics that is at once progressive in import and democratic in substance’. Although enlightened leadership is always needed, he points out that ‘no “leadership” can long go unchecked from “below” – not if it is to avoid a fall into highhandedness and self-indulgent elitism’. He then draws lessons about the importance of imaginative planning from Mozambique’s experiments with building ‘socialism in Africa’. Saul explains that one of the crucial lessons to learn is not ‘what not to do’, but rather that we cannot afford ‘not to dare to be self-reliant and economically imaginative and not to dare to be genuinely democratic and actively committed to the social and political empowerment of the people themselves. For not to so dare is, in our contemporary world, merely to wallow in a stagnant pond of self-serving vanguardism and in a post-Fanonist pattern of elite aggrandisement – even if such attitudes are, in South Africa, sustained within what is now a formally democratic process’. Saul thus makes a bold argument for confident, creative, accountable and imaginative leadership that prioritises people’s needs and domestic development on the continent.
The next two chapters look specifically at South Africa and explore the possibilities for developing Marxist-inspired politics today. Bond, Desai and Ngwane explore the issue of ‘uneven and combined Marxism’, playing on Trotsky’s famous ‘uneven and combined development’. Bond, Desai and Ngwane take stock of South African politics both within the ANC-led Alliance and within the independent social movements. They argue that we must begin our discussion on the South African Left by recognising the contradictory reality of South African social relations. They argue that ‘“uneven and combined Marxism” implies a way of considering the difficulties of constructing independent left politics in the conjuncture of a long-term capitalist stagnation in a twenty-first-century South Africa, in which some sectors of the economy – construction, finance and commerce – have been booming while many other former labour-intensive sectors of manufacturing were de-industrialised … and in which large sections of society are still peripheral to the interests of capital, domestic and global’. Through an analysis of social movement and left politics in South Africa, including the 2012 mineworkers’ struggles in Marikana, they convincingly argue that we need to consider ‘strategic questions for an agency-centred South African Left’, an area that is often neglected. They are, thus, challenging us to think beyond our old certainties and creatively embark on agentic practices.
In the final chapter, Jara explores the way in which the ANC’s post-apartheid politics has eschewed a Marxist orientation in favour of controlling and containing social forces, despite its rhetorical uses of ‘colonialism of a special type’ (CST) and ‘national democratic revolution’. Jara shows how the ‘ANC’s continued use of Marxism has been transformed into attempts to hegemonise and marry the working class to a project to transnationalise and deracialise South African capitalism’. At the same time, the ANC has retribalised and re-ethnicised South African political and social spaces. Using the cases of housing in the Western Cape and legislation targeting rural areas and traditional leadership, Jara powerfully shows how ‘the ANC’s nation-building project has failed to grapple with racialised post-apartheid social struggles over housing in the Western Cape’ and has attempted to retribalise the former bantustans through legislation that reinforces chieftancy and traditional patriarchal forms of leadership. Jara demonstrates that the ways in which the ANC has ‘acted on race and nation in the post-apartheid period has opened the door to the reproduction of apartheid racial categories and regressive forms of nationalism including the return of ethnic identity, white supremacist arrogance, regressive racial polarisation, narrow black elite solidarity and Africanist chauvinism particularly in relation to the so-called Indian and coloured racial “minorities”’. He shows how the national democratic revolution (the core of the ANC’s Marxism) is ‘an exhausted Marxism that is denuded of both its radical impulses and emancipatory logics, particularly when it comes to resolving the national question’. Jara thus embarks on a journey of renewal that has the courage to think with and against Marxism as the basis for a new democratic left politics.
Conclusion
In the late 1990s and early twenty-first century there has been a renewed interest in Marxism. Together, the chapters in this volume provide a refreshingly rich and creative engagement with Marxism, and challenge us to think beyond the comfort zone of our certainties and to open our minds to varied approaches to Marxism. While the volume offers a range of perspectives on Marxism, there are also important common strands that hold the diverse viewpoints and themes together. All the chapters take as their starting point a sympathy toward a critical Marxism, a rejection of vanguardism, a desire for and appreciation of involvement in political practice, and a belief that there is enough in Marxism broadly defined to make it relevant and necessary in the contemporary phase of capitalism.
This renewal of Marxism demonstrates a commitment to retrieving the critical impulse in Marxist thought and to drawing on new sources of Marxism to make sense of the contemporary contradictions of global capitalism. What is particularly interesting about the Marxism(s) emerging is the willingness to question the foundations of ‘Marxism’ and to look reflexively to new ways of integrating Marxism(s) today. The Marxism of today is anchored in new forms of rebellious activity that mark it apart from the deferential, vanguard politics of the twentieth century and has shifted from the academy to struggles led by the exploited themselves through participatory democratic processes. The chapters that make up this volume force us to rethink our dyed-in-the-wool understandings of