World View: Religion, racism and class (2002)

From the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The absurd claim of racism is that people’s behavioural, physical and cultural traits conform to a certain fixed and immutable pattern; and this determines the superiority or otherwise of a group in relation to others. This is an outlook that has been used to justify some of the most unspeakable and horrendous crimes against humanity, sometimes leading to killings of genocidal proportions.

In Eduardo Galegno’s Open Vein of Latin America, he recounts that before foreign conquerors set foot on the soil of the land the Indians totalled no less than 70 million. But a century-and-a-half later, they had been reduced to 3.5 million; and in 1685 only 4,000 Indian families remained of the more than two million that had once lived between Lima and Paita. Yet Archbishop Linan by Cisneros exposed how some of the church elders had perfected lies into a fine art. He said: “The truth is that they are hiding out, to avoid paying tribute, abusing the liberty which they enjoy and which they never had under the Incas.”

Racism however is flawed on a number of counts, not just for its barbarism and irrationality. Its fundamental arguments are basically weak. Where are those people who conform to racial purity, let’s say in terms of colour? You will meet a lot of dark-skinned people in Africa, but you will no doubt also come across light-skinned types in southern Africa and eastern Nigeria. How can one also argue that the Yanamani Indians or the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert are less intelligent than people in Norway or Japan. The two groups live in different material conditions, and these varied environments impose on them tasks and solutions that respond to their peculiar circumstances. In spite of the gaping loopholes in racists’ theories racism has been used together with religion to justify the enslavement of other people.

Islam, Christianity and Hinduism 

The Arabs and their Muslim counterparts, according to Dais Brion, were the first people to develop a specialised long-distance slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa. They were also the first people to view blacks as suited by nature for the lowest and the most degrading form of bondage. Rotter’s pioneering work and the research of Benard Lewis reveals that for medieval Arabs the blackness of Africans suggested sin, damnation and the devil. Arab scholars most of the time also invoked the biblical curse of Canaan to explain why the sons of Ham had been blackened and degraded to the status of natural slaves as punishment for the sins of their ancestors.

By the 10th century some Muslim writers asserted that Ham begot all blacks and people with crinkly hair and that “Noah put a curse on Ham according to which the hair of his descendants would not extend over their ears, and they would be enslaved wherever they were encountered”. Benard Lewis also quotes a 13th century Islamic historian from Iran who concluded that the Zanj (blacks) differed from animals only because their two hands are lifted above the ground and that many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanj.

In the 17th century Father Gregorio Garcia detected “Semitic blood” in the Indians, because like the Jews, “they are lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have done to them”. When Bartolome de Las Casas upset the Spanish court with his fiery denunciations of the conquistadors’ cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal Council had replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith. Another justification for holding other people as slaves was found in Leviticus 25:44 which said, “Both they bonds-men and they bonds-maid, which thou shalt have, shall be the heathen that are round you; of them shall ye buy bonds-men and bonds-maids.” But the most popular text on the matter is found in Genesis 9:25 which says, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren.” Some slave-owners went beyond the bible arguing that it might be wrong to enslave Christians, but that the Negro was not a human being and therefore could not become a Christian. One pious lady said, when asked if her Negro maid was to be baptised, “you might as well baptise my black bitch.” While Bishop Berkeley put the same idea into philosophical language when he said, “Negroes were creaturs of another species who had no right to be included or admitted to other sacraments.”

Similarly, racist sentiments are expressed in the Rig Veda, the Hindu scriptures of ancient India. Indra, the God of the Aryans, is described as “blowing away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the blackskins, which Indra hates”. The account further reports how Indra “slew the flat-nosed barbarians, the dark people called Anasahs. Finally, after Indra conquers the land of the Anasahs for his worshippers, he commands that the Anasahs are to be flayed of (their) black skin.”

The first distinctive feature to be noted in religion and racism is their appeal to a two-category system which presupposes a basic division of mankind into an “in” group and an “out” group. In addition, this fundamental division is supported, initiated and sanctioned by God himself. God has a special concern for the “in” group, and it receives his sustaining aid and grace. By contrast he is indifferent or hostile to the “out” group. In the final analysis God does not value all men equally, consequently he treats them differently. And this difference is not accidental but central to his will and purpose. The two-category system is correlated with an imbalance of suffering in which the “out” group suffers more than the rest of the people. In the account of the Rig Veda, for example, we know that God has less affection for the Anasahs because they suffer more than the Aryans. It is also evident from holy books like the bible and the Rig Veda that God’s favour or disfavour is correlated with the racial or ethnic identity of the group in question. God’s wrath and hostility are sometimes even directed at the physical features of a particular ethnic or racial community.

In the bible Yahveh often sides with the Israelites in the murderous campaigns to grab land from the Jebusites, Canaanites, Philistines, Amalekites in the same way that he was used to justify colonialism. Similarly in African traditional religion the God of a particular ethnic group assists it to overcome its enemies and brings prosperity to the “in” group. It stands to reason that whilst there is no rock-solid evidence to support the claim that God created man, there is enough justification in the materialist assertion that God is an invention of man. This is grimly illustrated by the fact that while Saddam Hussein was calling on God to help the Iraqis in the Gulf War, George Bush was doing the same thing. No God caused the death of the young men who were slaughtered; but the misguided beliefs and the greed of the ruling class.

Production and production relations 

Consequently the “out” and “in” scheme of analysis has nothing to do with God. It is a manifestation of the concrete and material world of humans reflected in their consciousness in the process of the production and distribution of wealth. Ultimately, production and production relations determine the ideas individuals have about themselves as a group, and about society at large in matters of morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. And it is only when we have identified and understood the material assets and constraints of a society, how it produces goods to meet its material needs, how the goods are distributed, and what type of social organisation sprouts from the organisation of production that we would have come a long way to understanding the culture and religious views of that society.

If the production relations are such that makes it possible for a minority to appropriate the end-product of the labour of the majority the views of the minority become the dominant ones in society, whilst the opinion of the majority are suppressed. The ownership of the means of production is thus important in understanding people’s perception of social phenomena – religion, philosophy, art etc. Bearing this in mind, we shall find that religious perceptions in any class-divided society are not neutral, but a tool in the hands of the dominant class in its struggle to maintain its control over economic surplus. Religious and all manner of spurious ideological theories are contrived by the ruling class or its representatives in the intellectual community and church organisations to keep the downtrodden perpetually entrapped in the vicious circle of exploitation.

As children in a predominantly Catholic community, we used to be told that God was surrounded by a host of angels with archangels. God was the boss and each angel and archangel had a specific assignment to perform in heaven. This was a world-view that sought to give blessing to the master-servant relationship that existed in the feudal era and class society in general.

Some quotations in the bible are also anti-worker if applied in today’s circumstances. Take for instance the saying, “But I say unto you, that ye resist no evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy cheek, turn to him the other also.” I suppose that when the Accountant General’s Office slashed as much as a 100,000 cedis from my salary in March, I should have responded: “Please my Lordship why are you so generous with me? Take 400,000 cedis more.” This would have been submissiveness stretched to its idiotic limits, and an invitation to exploitation and despotism. It could mean an acceptance of wage slavery, a system that is inimical to working people’s interests.

The New Testament also advises us to despise and deprecate worldly things in lieu of heavenly rewards. What would this mean for those who have already made material gains here on Earth? If people like Bill Gates are also God-fearing they would have a double reward; one on Earth and the other in heaven, whilst the God-fearing poor will have only one. As for the poor who are not God-fearing the extent of their loss and damnation is inestimable. The end result of these teachings if employed in a class society makes the working people docile and facilitates their exploitation by the owning class.

Convenient smokescreen

But this is not all. It also calls forth the other forms of alienation which are not strictly economic, but are organically linked to it. It is important to note that racism and religion tend to elevate the culture and other virtues of the dominant class; and denigrate that of the oppressed. But the class character of this domination especially becomes difficult to unmask if the oppressor class has a different racial background from the oppressed, as was the case during the heady days of apartheid and colonialism. Skin pigmentation and other physical characteristics subsume the class dimension of the problem, and exploitation is seen through the binoculars of race. One therefore develops a superiority or inferiority complex, depending on one’s physical traits; and the fundamental issue which is class exploitation is lost. Given these circumstances racism becomes a convenient smokescreen with which the ruling class masks its exploitation of labour. Eventually the attention of the working class is diverted from the real causes of its predicament; and a section of it becomes a pliant tool of the ruling class in its attempt to entrench the capitalist system.

The effect on that section of the working class which does not share similar physical characteristics with the owning class is to deny itself as different from the dominant class. It identifies and shares the convictions, doctrines and other attitudes of the dominant class which oppresses it. Guilt and an inferiority complex promoted by the dominant class and imbibed by the oppressed become the result of this process. Consequently the attempt to escape this inferiority by denying and condemning oneself becomes a lifelong struggle.

Let’s consider this for one moment. It is important to note that for many Christians, the traditional African religious individuals is superstitious and worships idols and several gods; there is only one God, though he has a son begotten by the Holy Spirit. This god is white, his angels are white; and when the saved finally go to heaven, they will wear white robes of purity. But the devil is black; his angels are black; sin itself is black and when the sinful finally go to hell, they will be burnt to black coal. It is surprising that the African converts sing in pleading terror: “Wash me Redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow?” And is it any wonder that some Africans buy skin-bleaching creams to lighten their dark skins? Is it also surprising that so-called educated and enlightened women often buy red, blonde or brunette wigs to hide their black hair or spend hours on end in hair saloons trying to make their hair curly and long?

Christianity even denies the African the right to their name. A name is a simple symbol of identity. But the African convert would normally be required to discard his African name and give himself such good Christian names as Smith, Verwoerd, Robert, James, Julius, Ironmonger, Winterbotham, Elizabeth, Summer, Winter and sometimes Autumn. This business of getting new names has its roots in slave property relations, where the person of the slave was the property of the owner to be disposed of and used as the master deemed fit. So slaves were branded with the master’s name.

The same story is true in art, dance, music, drama etc, but the ultimate objective in class society is one – to control the productive forces and appropriate economic surplus irrespective of the exploiter’s race or tribe. Economic control however is much more difficult to attain without political control. Political control is therefore established through proxy governments. Even then the vampire system finds that economic and political control are incomplete without cultural and hence ideological control. So the system employs religion and bogus theories like racism to ensure the mental castration of the worker be he European, Asian or African.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

“Money na hand before the chop” (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many years we have read about hunger in Africa. Newspaper headlines and television news have been saturated with gruesome scenes of corpses; and pictures of emaciated women and children standing helplessly before NGO officials waiting for food to be doled out to them. Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia have all experienced famine unparalleled in the history of the continent for the past forty years. Again we have seen statistics that show more than 800 million of our fellow humans suffering from chronic malnutrition; that on any day 1.3 million will go without food.

While these statistics are extremely shocking we can still find governments that pursue policies that are nothing less than obscene – ordering the destruction of food and paying farmers to take land out of production in order that prices can be kept high. The June 1999 issue of the European Voice, for instance, reported that the EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler was expected to propose a doubling of the proportion of arable land to be left uncultivated. Experts predicted that he was going to put forward a proposal to set aside 10 percent of land in the 1999 season, because the 5 percent level in previous years had failed to prevent soaring cereal production, causing a sharp drop in European Union market prices. This, according to the experts, forced the institution to buy in large amounts of surplus wheat and barley at guaranteed prices. Surplus stocks stood at about 15 million tonnes. “We estimate that if this rate of 5 percent is carried over into the next year, they will rise to 25 million tonnes,” Franz Fischler said. If this is not abominable what else can it be?

The Roman Catholic Church, charity organisations and NGOs may do their bit to soothe the pangs of hunger, by distributing milk powder, yellow corn and beans here and there. This would not be bad. But their work would not be addressing the fundamental cause of hunger. They would only be treating the symptoms of a malignant tumour which has deeper roots. The problem is the capitalist system of production whose article of faith is “money na hand before chop” (pay before you eat). It is a system many governments believe can be made to run in the interest of all, i.e. of both rich and poor alike. Thus the New Patriotic Party in Ghana refers to building a prosperous nation by creating wealth and sharing on the basis of private capital. The question is, is it possible to abolish hunger when a tiny minority own the means of production? In other words, is it possible to abolish hunger under the global profit system? The answer for me is no.

Need to make a profit

The fundamental reason for capitalist production is to produce for the market with a view to making profit. This overriding interest in profit does not change, no matter in which economic sector production is carried out. In agriculture, production is not carried out because people need food. Of course needs are not completely ruled out in the process of capitalist production. They are met albeit inadequately for the producers and more than sufficiently for the owning class, otherwise human society would perish. The point, however, is that this is marginal to the main focus of the market economic system, which is the accumulation of capital. But capitalist enterprises can only accumulate capital if they stay competitive by adding value to their products. So the market is also important in the capitalist system of production because profits can only be realised from a commodity if it is sold in a market and converted to money. It is also the reason why enterprises would go full hog to hoodwink people through deceptive adverts in order to sell their products even if they are shoddy and injurious to the health of the consumer. Most of these profits are then reinvested in production so increasing the size of the capital the enterprise controls. This is an imperative that is imposed on all capitalist enterprises by their competitive struggle for profits. In this competition capitalists are not reluctant to use the most base methods of survival – forgery, swindles, bribery, lies and extortion. Capitalists become like a pack of wolves wrangling over the prey – anytime ready to tear each other by the throat. Emile Zola, a French writer, put this dog-eat-dog scenario in perspective when he said:

“In these battles for money, secret and vile, where the weak are disembowelled, there are no longer bonds, kinship or friendship. It is the cruel principle of the strong, who eat others or else they will be eaten themselves” (L’argent, Francois Bernaud, Paris 1928, pp.339-40).

An irrational and cruel system such as capitalism is not a productive and distributive system concerned to ensure that bellies are full. Food is not produced because people need it to survive, but because the owners of land other means of production need to make profit. Also, no account would also be taken of whatever method is used to produce such food, i.e. whether it is ruinous to the environment or not. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides are used in agriculture, animals injected with hormones, and fertile lands used to grow coffee and tobacco instead of millet or maize. One’s ability to access food is through ownership and money. Amartya Sen underscored this point in a study he undertook for the ILO when he pointed out that starvation is a function of entitlements and not of food availability.

In the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe people get money to pay for their food in two ways. They either milk other people or allow themselves to be milked, depending on the position they occupy in relation to the means of production. So one’s ability to eat and make a choice of what one wants to eat depends on money. This is a property claim in that the exchange of money for food is a property transaction involving the exchange of equivalent values.

In underdeveloped countries like Ghana, Ethiopia and Bangladesh, the situation is not exactly the same. There is a category of people that can have access to food without necessarily selling their labour output to others. Such people can have access to food without money because they directly own and work the land. But, here again, one realises some concurrence between what pertains in the sense that it is either ownership or non-ownership of the means of production that determines the ability of a person to have access to food. There are others according to Amartya Sen whose ownership arise from money obtained from petty trading. The loud noises made about the scarcity of food is not entirely justified. There is a lot of food in Ghana and most other developing countries; but the fundamental problem is whether the propertyless masses can afford to pay for it.

No solution within market system

With the opening of the Ghanaian economy to unbridled market forces, the market stalls are stocked with a variety of food items – burgers, cheese, honey, ham, frogs’ legs, etc; but the poor can only cast desirous looks at them and pass by. In spite of the glaring inequalities and obvious contradictions in the market system, the New Patriotic Party government and other governments in Africa, together with imperialists frontal organisations like the IMF and World Bank believe that it can work in the interest of all – poor and rich alike.

Whether this type of thinking is born out of a genuine lack of understanding of how the capitalist system works is not the main thrust of this article. What is of concern is whether the market system can solve the perennial food shortages that continue to affect hundreds of millions of people in Africa and other parts of the world, including those in the capitalist metropolis. The myth surrounding the capability of the capitalist system to feed the hungry and abolish hunger was demythologised many years ago when Henry Kissinger made a promise to the world food summit that this was indeed possible. At the time there were 400 million chronically malnourished, a 75-million increase over the previous ten years. Yet Kissinger had an almost sanguine expectation that this would happen. He swore world hunger would be eradicated without considering the eradication of the most fundamental cause of the problem – capitalism. Twenty years after Kissinger’s promise the situation has more than worsened. The number of poor and hungry people has since doubled; and experts believe that not even the best of efforts could improve the situation in the next thirty or so years.

Many more years to come we will continue to witness many more of such summits and conferences all purporting to examine the phenomenon of global hunger and find lasting solutions to it. A lot of bilge will be thrown up as solutions to the problems, but you can bet the last coin in your pocket that no remedy will be found. This would not be because there is no solution. It would be because there is one solution which is distasteful and horrifying to governments whose role is to facilitate the running of the capitalist state machine. It is socialism.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

Tribalism, colonialism and capitalism (2000)

From the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The festering of tribalist, nationalist and racist sentiment are nurtured and sustained by the capitalist system

Within the context of neo-colonial statehood, tribalism is a colonial derivative based on matriarchal or patriarchal relations forged in the distant past and used by an ethnic group as a defensive and an offensive weapon against other groups. The position of some of those who see tribalism as the main cause of Africa’s present social and economic predicament follows a familiar pattern of thinking. The colonialists, according to them, tried to make a nation-state out of a hotch-potch of antagonistic and uncivilised African peoples but failed in their pious mission. The various tribes had age-long hatred for one another and as soon as the colonial power went the natives descended into barbarism maiming and killing each other.

Nationalists in Africa see the matter differently, painting idyllic pictures of the African past and blaming all the tribal conflicts that have erupted after independence solely on colonialism. This viewpoint is as historically incorrect as it is undialectical. Facts abound on how the internal evolution of some African communities before colonialism and mercantile capitalism had provided groups of people the opportunity to appropriate the labour of others, accumulate economic surplus and consequently subjugate other communities. This is a scenario that must have generated a certain level of tribal animosity and discrimination based on economic exploitation and wealth, even if this was on a minor scale compared with the situation in colonial times and the post-independence era. It was these differences that were deliberately and carefully nurtured by the colonialists, and later exploited by the neo-colonial bourgeoisie after independence to keep the people manacled to the capitalist system.

In colonial times

Colonialism whether it was of the British, Belgian, French or German variety was not meant to be a benign enterprise. The motive behind its establishment was one: the exploitation of labour and the accumulation of economic surplus. Consequently, the driving force behind it, capitalism, did not spare the exploitation of labour in both the metropolis and other lands even if it meant spilling blood to fulfil this sordid agenda.

This mercenary impulse had implied increased production, technological expansion, the growth of the external and domestic market and ultimately the annexation and political control of other territories. Tribal groups which stood in the way were, in colonial parlance, pacified. But if, as suggested in some quarters, the colonial enterprise had meant to pacify and carve out viable nation-states capable of competing with metropolitan capitalism, the monopolistic tendency and vampire essence of the profit system would have been still-born. Far from creating problems for itself, its policy towards the people of the colonies was guided by the trinitarian doctrine—atomisation, exploitation and domination. This unfolded in its pattern of social and economic investment in what came to be known as Ghana and before that as the Gold Coast.

British colonial policy encouraged investments in only those areas of the colony which were endowed with mineral and forest resources. This pattern of investment engendered considerable regional variations in terms of the provision of roads, railway lines and social services. Thus the Southern Sector which by virtue of its location abounded in timber, gold and fertile soil benefited far more in terms of infrastructural development than the Northern territories which did not have any known mineral resources. But even in the Southern part of the colony there was discrimination in the provision of amenities on the basis of the contribution to the exportable surplus. The pattern of investment that characterised British economic policy was not born out of any preference for the Asante over the Dagarti, but based on cold capitalist reasoning. After all, some minimum maintenance of workers’ health and education was a reasonable investment since it ensured the maximisation of the extraction of surplus from the worker; and the greedy capitalists by their calculations knew this too well.

How did this promote tribalism? By annexing the Gold Coast and putting the people in a subordinate status, the British colonial power froze any further evolution and consolidation of a national identity. For example, it destroyed the principal catalyst for achieving the unity of fragmented loyalties. Not only did colonialism deprive states like Benin, Oyo and Asante of all their principal vassals and tributary states, but it followed up the process of fragmentation by smashing the basis of the hegemonic power of these states thus giving full rein to all manner of divisive tendencies.

While pretending to be carrying out a mission of uniting the incorrigibly warring tribes British colonial policy consciously and systematically separated the various people, creating conflict and ill-will among them. The colonial government sometimes saw the value of stimulating tribal jealousies so as to keep the colonised from dealing with their principal opposition—the colonial and the emergent African bourgeoisie who together were milking the people.

By categorising the various linguistic subgroups in the Gold Coast—Frafra, Dagarti, Ninkarsi Kusaasi, Dagomba, Akyim, Asante and Fanti—as tribes the colonial regime began to nurture parochial and exclusivist consciousness among people who previously had regarded themselves as one. All official documents in colonial times, for example, required information on the place of origin and ethnic background of the individual. Names were thus suffixed with one’s tribal background and area of origin. Feeling regarded as a member of an ethnic group by others and that they would behave towards you accordingly, individuals began to feel the need to identify more closely with their “kith and kin” and to promote its interest relative to others.

Racist colonial ideology ignored the fact that the people of the Gold Coast shared a common heritage of colonial oppression and colonially-induced capitalist exploitation with its concomitant ills: poverty, ignorance, disease and malnutrition. As a result, its philosophy of determining the inferiority or superiority of a people in terms of the extent to which they had culturally imbibed all what the colonial establishment represented came to dominate the worldview of some Africans.

Colonial ideology and culture operated on the basis of a hierarchy of cultures in which that of the metropolitan bourgeoisie was supposed to be supreme. The culture of the country of origin of the metropolitan bourgeoisie therefore became the standard by which a people’s level of primitiveness or barbarism was determined. The more your thinking, values and mannerisms were close to the colonialists’ the more human you were; and by implication the further your behaviour and outlook were from the masters’ the less human you were. This explained why the rich and educated elite who were products of the colonial educational system did not answer questions in their African dialect but in English. They talked about the opera which they had never seen except from a distance, referred to winter and Buckingham Palace and, above all, adopted a critical attitude towards other Africans who they derogatively referred to as “bush people”.

But the idea of trying to approximate to the coloniser was not only to be found in the relations between the African and the European coloniser. Sometimes Africans tried to approximate their status to other Africans if they thought those individuals enjoyed a higher status. African ethnic groups which had a high number of educated and rich people within them as a result of their long contact with the coloniser tended to feel superior to others. Even if they were poor and illiterate they identified psychologically with those in their tribal group who were rich and educated. It did not matter to the poor Asante, Frafra or Ewe person if all of them were victims of crude exploitation by colonialism and the African bourgeoisie. In their minds, the identification with the tribal big boss and the fact that they came from the same ethnic background was enough, even if it did not ensure the enjoyment of a spoon of marmalade from the master’s table. These exclusivist and warped thinking explained why a poor Asante for example could feel deeply offended if he was mistaken for a Busanga or any other tribe. This not only lead to more barriers between the ethnic groups but effectively undermined their capacity to confront capitalist exploitation. The inter-ethnic struggle for superiority or at least to avoid the stigma of inferiority dissipated the energies of the people.

Tribalism today

The African bourgeoisie which assumed the mantle of power after colonial rule also did not fail to realise the usefulness of tribalism in the struggle against the African masses. Like racial violence in Europe, tribalism was a means to an end: deflecting the anger of the masses from the neo-colonial bourgeoisie and directing it at other members of the working class. In another sense it was the most convenient cover for the capitalist robbers who stole economic surplus from the working class and poor peasants. The attitude of the African bourgeoisie towards the colonial state that it inherited, therefore, was not that of dismantling and radically transforming the exploitative relations of production. It was guided by the desire to inherit the colonial state-machine and seek accommodation with international capital in the extraction of economic surplus from the working people. Consequently, post-independence politics in Africa has witnessed the arousal and manipulation of tribal passions and petty differences among ethnic groups, for the same sordid reasons that the bourgeoisie in Europe sometimes find convenient it to use racism.

The predatory character of capitalism coupled with the hollowness and hypocrisy of the African bourgeoisie created fertile conditions for the festering of this cancerous disposition. Slogans, values and the moral high ground postured by the bourgeoisie as events unfolded long after independence have been blatantly self-serving. As for their masters abroad, the state machinery has now become an important instrument in their quest for capital accumulation at the expense of the masses, whom they claim in political party campaigns to be liberating from poverty, disease, etc. However, given the peculiar historical and economic circumstances in which it has had to evolve it is not an exact carbon copy of its masters abroad.

The African bourgeoisie is more desirous of imbibing the lifestyles and privileges of its overlords in Europe and America than showing the creative and strong interest in production that marked the genesis of the bourgeoisie in Europe. Its extravagance and neo-colonial conditions have been at the core of the steep declines of production levels in recent times, leading to shocking levels of destitution and poverty. But it is precisely these conditions of want that the bourgeoisie has shamelessly manipulated to scuttle the unity of the dispossessed in the towns using tribalism as a tool.

Cruel economic conditions have forced many residents in poverty-stricken suburbs to seek help and protection by means of a network of social obligations, transferring some of their traditional feudal loyalties and institutions to the urban environment. Most ethnic groups in Accra, Kumasi and Sekondi-Takordi have installed chiefs to whom they pay allegiance and seek protection. Tribal associations have also been formed to advance the cause of particular ethnic groups and used as sources of benefit: help in finding a job, accommodation, money and credit. People also stick together to make common cause against other tribal groups in the struggle for economic survival in the dog-eat-dog environment that has been created by capitalism.

It is these tribal associations that provide arenas for the various factions of the bourgeoisie to launch offensives and counter-offensives against each other in their struggle for political and economic power. Events in the run-up to this month’s presidential election in Ghana provide ample testimony of this, as many of such groups with the backing of the bourgeoisie have sprung up, all seeking to advance the interest of the bourgeoisie in the various ethnic groups. They have organised and whipped up the sentiments of the lower strata of their tribespeople against rivals belonging to different ethnic groups. They have created the impression that it is only when one of your tribesmen is at the helm of affairs that you can have a fair share of national development and individual personal advancement. Consequently, where a presidential or vice-presidential candidate comes from has become extremely important.

But as it has always been the case after every election, and will surely be the case after this month’s elections, that those factions that win the election will easily forget about the ethnic support base they so subtly manipulated to propel themselves to power. They will shun the company of their poor tribespeople who supported them and will fraternise closely with their allies in other ethnic groups. The rancour and bitterness that characterised their relations will soon be forgotten, except on political party platforms. They will play tennis, billiards and golf together and discuss lucrative business contracts in posh hotels. As for their indigent brethren who had worked tirelessly to put them in power, they will have to start thinking seriously about how to pay school fees, feed the family, and get good accommodation.

The festering of tribalist, nationalist and racist sentiment are nurtured and sustained by the capitalist system of production which produces only for profits and not for needs. The abolition of the profit system and its replacement with socialism based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for production and distribution would put an end to discrimination and bigotry. But this cannot happen unless people understand and see the need for this kind of change. More than ever before, the formation of socialist parties in Africa to take up the task of spreading the socialist message has become urgent.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

Ghana: The Ruling Class and the State (1999)

From the August 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concept of classes and class struggle in most African educational and political forums is treated as if it a were cultic secret; a taboo subject. This is not surprising. Class struggles and classes are basically about state power, a fact rightly considered as subversive and extremely dangerous by the ruling and propertied classes, and embarrassing by “objective” academics.

The attitude of academics whose intellectual output supports the capitalist establishment therefore goes beyond mere academic interest. The alleged non-existence of classes and class struggles in Ghana serves the interest of the “haves” both at the national and international levels. It explains why the intelligentsia and politicians strive, even if they have read and understood Marxism, to any lengths to mangle and decant it of its essence. It enables the most vicious and corrupt political leadership to harp on about the so-called harmonious development and the social homogeneity of the African population. Marxism is normally seen as an ideology of violence and division and therefore un-African.

There are two distinct systems of production in Ghana; the modern dominant capitalist sector and the traditional sector. Formerly the capitalist sector was supported by indigenous capital, foreign private capital and state capital. Since 1983 when the government embarked on its privatisation drive, the situation has witnessed a major shift with the marginalisation of the state sector and the virtual asphyxiation of an already fledgling indigenous private capitalist sector. The IMF and World Bank-propelled economic programme has all but put foreign private capital in a very strong position. What is of crucial importance here is the role that these sectors in the economy play in the appropriation of surplus labour. The garb that they present themselves in is of less importance to slaves of capital. They are all vampires whose existence depends on the exploitation of workers. It is the unpaid part of the daily total labour of the Ghanaian worker which is the source of capitalist surplus value. This form of exploitation is not too difficult to identify in the privately-owned enterprises—both foreign and domestic. It is less visible in the few surviving state enterprises. But the fact that there are two aspects of reality must not be lost sight of—the outward appearance of a phenomenon and its true nature.

On the surface, state enterprises present a picture of belonging to the workers. As if to emphasise this fact it is often said that they state belongs to everybody and it is the money of the people that has been used to set up the enterprise. However, the workers are completely shut out of management decisions and have no role in deciding how surpluses should be distributed. The fact is that surpluses extracted from workers in the state enterprises go mainly to the privileged minority class, who control the Ghanaian state, albeit in a subordinate position to international finance capital. The results of production are monopolised, appropriated by this class for the purposes of enrichment and domination of the toiling worker.

It goes without saying that a society like the Ghanaian society in which the labour of the majority is appropriated by a few would inevitably present sharp contrasts in wealth and poverty. In Ghana the privileged minority class almost exclusively have access to bank credit facilities and other privileges like good and higher education, better housing, etc. The situation of the underprivileged is however worrisome. According to the government statistician more than 30 percent of them live below the poverty line. Average real wages and salaries are only 25 percent of what they were in 1968 and per capita income is still $460, exactly what it was in 1957 when Ghana attained independence. The ability of one group to appropriate the surplus product of others has thus engendered the division of the society into classes.

The Ghanaian capitalist class is extremely factious and splintered. Outwardly it presents a picture of monolithicism, but in reality it is fragmented, into “comprador” and “national” sections. There is also a large petty bourgeoisie. Issa Shinji objects to the use of the term “national” to describe one of the segments of this class on the grounds that there is a remarkable absence of the qualities that are normally attributed to the bourgeoisie in Europe. Colonialism discouraged local business enterprise in the colonies; while its policy in the metropolis was free trade. Anyone wishing to achieve wealth and status in the then Gold Coast or present day Ghana therefore had to chase a career in the professions, civil service or the armed forces or work within the banks, industrial enterprises and mining companies, which were by and large controlled by foreigners.

The “comprador” segment is that which is made up of those capitalists who consciously collaborate with imperialism in an attempt to bolster their class interests. In Ghana it is closely linked to Japan Motors, Mobil Shell, Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, etc. It stubbornly protects the interests of these multi-national companies, both politically and economically because it reckons quite rightly that the rate of its profit maximisation and therefore its survival is directly connected to the fate of these companies.

The “national” bourgeoisie on the other hand has a stronger tendency to strive for internal capital accumulation; but this desire is not because it wants to redistribute its wealth to the poorer classes. What it seeks to do is to monopolise for itself the opportunity to milk the working class. Its struggle against foreign capital therefore does not make it more progressive than others. It merely seeks to control all the levers of economic exploitation and this does not make it any different from the comprador section as far as the Ghanaian working class is concerned. The “comprador” and the “national” capitalists have one thing in common—the maintenance of the current relations of production which are based on exploitation. Vampires are all the same—they suck the blood of their victims.

The national bourgeoisie in Ghana has however been incapacitated in its struggle against foreign capitalist interests operating in the country for a number of reasons. It lacks managerial experience, depends heavily on imported raw materials, and is given to a riotous and vulgar lifestyle. But what dealt the so-called national bourgeoisie a more devastating blow was the economic policies of the government, dictated by the two Bretton Woods Institutions—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The agreement of the government to devalue the cedi led to the rise of the cost of imported materials needed for production. Apart form this the conditions imposed by the donors for the distribution of credits made it more difficult than before to obtain loans to oil the wheels of the domestic manufacturing sector. These coupled with the liberalisation policy led to the influx of an avalanche of cheap goods from the United States and Western European import substitution industries, operating through south-east Asian client states, thus robbing domestic producers of hitherto protected markets. The domestic private sector which is controlled by the national bourgeoisie was suffocated because its avenue for domestic accumulation of capital was choked.

The state, class and political power

The fractionalised nature of the ruling class in Ghana (and most African states) often engenders a high level of political competition in it and hence a high degree of politicisation. Any group within it which emerges triumphant in this competition normally gains a number of advantages. The control of government and the state machine facilitates its monopolisation of the economic means of production and it can manage political power to the exclusion of the other groups. Thus political party campaigns since 1957 have not been geared towards any fundamental structural changes in the economic base of the state to improve the lot of the toiling masses. All the political parties are representatives of the various factions of the capitalist class whose ultimate objective is not the dismantling of the state machine, but its maintenance and the furtherance of their economic interests. This explains why the political parties in Ghana today, in whatever garb or guise they present themselves—Busia-Danguali, Nkrumaist or Third Force—sing the same song: the maintenance of the wage and profit system. All claims to fighting for the common people are not only hollow and meaningless concepts to mask their devious intentions; but actually the funeral dirges of the working people. And they often succeed in carrying out their sinister designs because no genuine alternative choices are presented.

The state thus becomes a major plank for the building-up of the economic power of that section of the bourgeoisie that wins elections and for the consolidation of its political power.

The state is used to procure as much money as possible through over-inflated contracts, corruption and outright plundering of public coffers. As a result the people who voted politicians into office become disenchanted with them, and a feeling of alienation among the masses sets the stage for the rejection of the leadership in the next election. The leaders then become insecure, strengthen the apparatus of repression and brutalise those who had supported them and their opponents alike. An atmosphere of insecurity is created as a by-product of this situation, and the leaders become pre-occupied with the politics of survival, with remaining in office at all cost. In the resultant manoeuvring for security of office all state institutions are personalised. In other words retention of high office and promotion come to depend on the presumed loyalty of the individual to the “Great Leader”. The army and the police are never disregarded. These coercive institutions become active foci of these conflicts and are drawn willy-nilly into the vortex of these battles. They too are divided along these lines of sectional interest and their neutrality becomes compromised. Their response to the demands of the ruling class cannot be predicted with certainty, and they become exposed as pawns in the power games of the capitalist class. The fragility of the neo-colonial state becomes glaring and it cannot be counted on as an instrument of control and reform.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

State and class in pre-colonial West Africa (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Was the state instituted for mutual protection or did it arise when society became divided into classes?

Long before Marx and Engels, political thinkers and philosophers had written extensively on the concept of the state. In the 1640s, Thomas Hobbes had argued that the state was essentially a contract between the individual and the government. The alternative, called by Hobbes the state of nature, was a thoroughly unpleasant life—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

This, according to Hobbes, the state emerged to improve mankind’s lot. However, Engels, summing up his historical analysis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that the State was a product of class society: “It is an admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.” As if to echo Engels, Marx pointed out that the state could not have arisen, let alone maintained itself, had it been possible to reconcile classes. According to Marx the state is an instrument of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.

Marx revealed that a definite level of development of labour productivity is essential before there is real opportunity for humans to exploit other humans. If people produce only the minimum of products required to maintain their physical existence and reproduction, any systematic appropriation of someone else’s labour is out of the question. The opportunity to appropriate someone else’s labour appears only when the productive forces have developed to the level at which the quantity of goods produced somewhat exceeds the minimum required to maintain the direct producers’ lives. The question then arises: Did Africa’s labour productivity reach a level that provided the opportunity for humans to exploit their fellow human beings? The answer is both no and yes. The appropriate answer to this question would enable us to determine the original of the state in pre-colonial Africa.

But it would be absurd to think of only the level of productive forces without the relations of production. Productive forces cannot be developed in a vacuum. People produce them jointly—in groups rather than on their own. People’s relationship to the means of production determine their position and place in the production and the mode of distribution of the products. Where one group of people makes its living by appropriating the labour of the other, then society is divided into the exploiter and exploited. The need to maintain this vampiric relationship of production leads to the rise of an apparatus of coercion and conditioning to systematically brainwash the exploited into accepting their exploitation as a normal condition of life or to crush their resistance.

Before private ownership

If this analysis of state and class is anything to go by then one cannot authentically talk of the state among some of the communities in Ghana before the 14th century. The predominant principle of social relations was that of the family and kinship associated with communalism. Among the Gur social groups in the Upper East Region of Ghana, for example, every member of the society had their position defined in terms of their relationship with their mother’s or father’s family. Leadership was based on religious ties to the Tindana, or custodian of the land, who ran the affairs of the people with a committee of elders chosen from all the families and clans of the territory. This committee administered land, the major means of production not as its personal property, but as the property of all the people in Gurum-Tinga (Gur land) who had the right to till it. Hunting, fishing and grazing grounds for animals were organised in a similar manner. No-one starved whilst others stuffed themselves with food and threw the excess away or sold it for profit. The basic economic law was that of providing the members of society with the necessary means of subsistence through communal ownership of the means of production. The absence of private property in the means of production, of the division into classes and the exploitation of man by man excluded the need for a state. Production was essentially of use values; and there was no alienation of the producer from his means of production.

The fundamental flaw in the social organisation of the Gur however was that the position of the Tindana was supposedly sanctioned by the gods, and therefore permanent. This notion also applied to the elders of families and clans who served in the committee of elders. Only death could loosen their grip on authority. This meant that people occupying positions of trust could use their positions for personal gain, taking a significant share of communal property and becoming rich; indeed vestiges of private ownership of property began to rear its ugly head in the Gur community around the 16th century. However this development did not reach its fullest maturity before the violent intrusion of British colonial rule. To a very large extent, this explained why the British colonial government had to create chiefs in Gur land and use them as instruments of its policy of exploitation and dehumanisation.

It is also important to note that once African societies began to expand by internal evolution, and the instruments of labour were perfected, people obtained more means of subsistence than was essential for their survival. The restricted nature of communal property and the egalitarian distribution of products of labour that characterised people such as the Gur acted as a drag on the further development of the productive forces. The need for joint labour disappeared with the appearance of sickles, iron-tipped hoes, spears and arrows. What this meant was that the possibility of individual labour also emerged. But individual labour brought about private ownership, private ownership brought about inequality between the people; and rich and poor people emerged. In the Mali empire, for example, the dominant mode of production was feudalism even though the communal and slave modes of production had not completely died out. By the end of the 15th century there were both chattel and domestic slaves in Mali comparable to the feudal serfs in Europe. In Senegal Portuguese traders also found that there were elements in the population who worked most days for their masters and a few days per month for themselves—a budding feudalist tendency.

A cursory look at the socio-economic and political scene in Africa before colonisation does not reveal one dominant mode of production. Also it is not easy to compartmentalise the socio-economic formations and arrange them in a sequence as some writers do, because the social and economic terrain reveals considerable unevenness in development. There were social formations representing hunting bands, communalism, feudalism while other formations represented a mixture of these. It was upon these that colonialism was superimposed.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

The poverty of education in Ghana (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a close affinity in Ghana between post-independence politics and the pre-independence era when the political and intellectual African elite were mobilising support from the African masses to overthrow the colonial establishment. Both have been full of promises and rosy dreams of what the future ought to be like.

Elections in Ghana these days, for example, remind one of the politics of agitation by the Nkrumah’s, J. B. Danquah’s and the Houphuet-Boigny’s in the colonial days. Equality, freedom and freedom from poverty and oppression are sonorously proclaimed these days too; and every available propaganda tool is used by parties to discredit other political parties in the bid to win the support of the voting public. But the results of these bitter campaigns have always ended in the same way. As soon as any political party assumes the mantle of office, the ideas that it used to politicise the masses to propel it to power becomes a fetter on the purpose of the leadership of the party. The demands for equality and freedom from poverty, and the vitriolic criticisms launched against the oppressive economic policies of previous governments, are inevitably forgotten and equally inevitably people come to direct them at the party that has taken over the reins of power. The difficulty of the political leadership is that it wants to inherit the privileged positions of previous governments, that it has unseated either in an election or a coup d’état, without implementing the progressive and radical sounding ideas which had helped it to come into power. It knows too well that its interest as the representative of the ruling class and international capital are diametrically opposed to the interest of the majority. And it cannot fundamentally transform the existing relations of production in the interest of the masses, without limiting its own access to economic surplus. The interests of the Ghanaian ruling class since independence is just the same as those of the old colonial regime; and it works with the forces of neo-colonialism and international capital to negate the consciousness of the masses, using its unlimited access to the economic surplus to attain this objective.

Ruling class and ruling ideas 

The national bourgeoisie and international capital have succeeded in foisting their ideas on the majority of the people largely because of their control over material production. Marx and Engels’s claim that “the class which has the material means of production at its disposal has control at the same time over the mental means of production, so that generally speaking those who lack the mental means of production are subject to it” seems to describe the Ghanaian situation aptly. In no other field have the techniques of mental control been employed with such efficiency as in the educational system. Apart from being inaccessible to a majority of Ghanaians it seeks to create the myth that the current neo-colonial and capitalist direction of development are sacrosanct and inviolable. The school curriculum, especially in the social sciences, is replete with all kinds of bogus assertions seeking to justify the unjustifiable. The educational system has thus evolved essentially into a positive instrument serving neo-colonialism and the ruling class in Ghana; whilst at the same time making it difficult for the propertyless classes to understand the true nature and causes of their wretched conditions.

This is evident in the economics syllabus in educational institutions and the thinking of prominent intellectuals on the subject. They all reflect the ideas of bourgeois academicians in America and Britain. Consequently the ideas they propagate manifest the interest of capital. Books written by Harvey, Adam Smith, Caincross and Hansen are not only important textbooks for students but reference books for teachers. The ability to regurgitate the ideas in these books in examinations qualifies one to be a graduate of economics and enhances the chances of an individual to aspire to lucrative jobs. These books are devoid of class analysis in their presentation of current economic problems, ignore imperialistic influences as factors in the underdevelopment of a country, and propagate the myth that without foreign investment economic growth and development would be hampered. The exploitative aspects of foreign and Ghanaian enterprises are either completely ignored or little discussed. The worship and devotion to free enterprise is therefore total. The impression that private investment of capital is essential for economic growth relegates labour to a secondary position in industry and prepares the minds of the people to accept the dominance of capital over labour in the process both of production and distribution. It also seeks to imprint in the minds of the recipients of education the idea that the profit motive is both essential and intrinsic to increased productivity; and the belief that free-for-all competition at the market place is the only way to realise the overall interest of society.

The alternative to the free market policy is normally presented as the state ownership of the means of production. What is not discussed or is not known is that the state ownership of the means of production prescribed and fixed in law does not preclude the exploitation of labour by capital. Capitalism is not only characterised by the legal form that class possession of the means of production takes. That is the superficial aspect of it. The essential aspect is the social fact that those who “possess” the means of production exploit wage labour and accumulate surplus value thus obtained as capital. The immediate post-independent West African economics would suffice to illustrate this point. Workers sold their labour power to various state enterprises; and the products of their labour were sold in the market place with a view to profit. The difference between the wages of the producers and the value of what they produced was used for capital accumulation and the consumption of the privileged classes. Under the guise of socialism that state was employed by the ruling classes to appropriate economic surpluses from the masses. State ownership sought to hide the monstrosity of capitalist exploitation by confusing socialism with state property and presenting it to the producers of wealth as the best.

With the failure of the economic recovery programme staring them in the face, the ruling class has become louder in their call for “indigenisation” in recent times. Suddenly the ghost of economic nationalism is being resurrected after it had been banished from economic planning. Conspicuously absent are those aspects and activities of enterprises that have made their operations inimical to the interest of a majority of Ghanaians, irrespective of their origin.

Imprinting minds

The ethos, symbols, values, lifestyles, relations of production and modes of operations are not of primary concern to the new converts of indigenisation. What matters is the encouragement of Ghanaian manufacturers to produce more to capture the local market from “foreigners”. But such factors as mentioned constitute strong inbuilt pressures on local entrepreneurs to cave in to the wishes of foreign capital. Instead of enterprises becoming more and more national in the use of local resources and in satisfying of the needs of the vast majority of Ghanaians it is in fact the Ghanaian entrepreneurs who are going to become less and less national. The ultimate beneficiaries will be the privileged classes whose share of the surplus in the exploitation of Ghanaian labour would increase. Indigenisation would therefore essentially become a weapon of the haves in the country to realise their dreams of increasing their wealth which was somewhat crushed during the heydays of liberalisation.

Ethnic chauvinism 

In sociology and anthropology one encounters the bogus assertion that Ghana has ethnic and not class relations. This argument is nurtured by bourgeois politicians and their mentors in sociology departments who want power based on communal hegemony. Normally the place occupied by individuals in a historically determined system of social production is not made the basis of analysis. While it is not denied that ethnic consciousness exists in Ghana, the phenomenon has to be recognised as part of the ideological rationalisation that reinforces and in turn reflects the existing relations of production. Classes in Ghana may be embryonic but they exist. Thus while ambitious petty bourgeois politicians preach and fan the deadly parochialism of ethnic chauvinism they actively form alliances with petty bourgeois elements in the various other ethnic groups to consolidate their repressive domination of the masses. Ethno-centrism as presented by bourgeois sociology is essentially a weapon of the dominating classes to dissipate the energies of the working class, divide them, and strangle potentially progressive organisations.

Another fraudulent intellectual claim obviously calculated to instil false consciousness in the recipients of education is that Ghana’s present underdevelopment is a direct inheritance from the pre-colonial times. The history departments and historians of repute in universities have made no attempt to prove or disprove this assertion. They just reproduce it for students to swallow and regurgitate during examinations. The impression this propaganda pap seeks to create is implicit: that pre-colonial conditions continue to be reproduced. But three questions immediately come to mind when issues of this nature are discussed. Is this claim correct? If it is correct why is it that these conditions have persisted in spite of years of colonialism and neo-colonialism? What forces are reproducing them and why?

It should be understood that societies are not static and Ghanaian societies were not an exception to this law of development. They also went through the processes of change that characterised societies elsewhere. These changes were to be found in the revolutionary transformation of the social structures, relations of production and techniques of production of social groups. What impacted negatively on these processes of change were two things—the slave trade and the subsequent integration of Ghanaian societies into the world capitalist system in a subordinate position. One cannot deny the infrastructural changes that contact with Europe brought in its wake; but the subsequent material benefits benefited the metropolitan bourgeoisie and the sham bourgeoisie in the colonial country. It condemned the majority to perpetual poverty.

Some contemporary African writings used as literature books in universities and secondary schools in Ghana also do not adequately address the phenomenon of exploitation. Mongo Betis’s Poor Christ of Bomba; Rene Maran’s Batouala; Oyono’s The House Boy; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God; and Camera Laye’s African Child tend to emphasise the superstructural aspects of colonialism. The imposition of colonialism through brute military force and the subsequent destruction of African socio-cultural and political institutions are given prominence in these writings. What is not normally clearly established or is often ignored is the link between the superstructural aspects of colonial rule and its economic base—production relations. The colonial production relations were the foundation upon which the political, juridical, ethical and religious aspects of colonialism were founded. But in these works the cultural and political aspects of colonialism are artificially severed from the production relations which provided it with its life-force and dynamism.

However, available evidence proves that the real reason for colonialism was to ensure the haemorrhage of capital from the fringes of the capitalist system to its core. The cultural and political domination which were made very much part of the colonial system were therefore a means to an end.

Adongo Aidan Avugma