Halo, Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who knows what goes on behind the closed doors of convents? Bitter Winter (19 April) reported that the French Dominican Sisters of the Holy Spirit were so aggrieved at the behaviour of one of their nuns that they asked the Vatican to send in one of its Gumshoes to investigate her. The Sister was then effectively fired. Displaying secular umbrage she then took herself off to a tribunal and got herself awarded two hundred thousand euros for false dismissal. The tribunal apparently found the investigation biased because the Cardinal in charge of it was ‘friendly’ with another nun known to be an opponent of the one in question’.

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‘An influential traditional priest aged 63 has sparked outrage in Ghana by marrying a 12-year-old girl… During the ceremony, women speaking in the local language Ga told the girl to dress teasingly for her husband. They can also be heard advising her to be prepared for wifely duties and to use the perfumes they gifted her to boost her sexual appeal to her husband.’ Apparently, the girl (shouldn’t that be child?) ‘started the rites to become the priest’s wife six years ago, but the process did not interfere with her education.’ She will also be ‘educated’ in her ‘marital responsibilities such as childbearing’. An NGO reports that 19 percent of girls in Ghana are married before they reach eighteen and 5 percent get married before their fifteenth birthday (BBC 1 April).

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Charlie Hebdo is a French Private Eye-type magazine. In 2006 the magazine reprinted twelve cartoons depicting the founder of Islam which the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten had published in 2005. This did not go down well in certain sections of society. In 2015 two Algerian brothers entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve of the staff and wounded eleven more.

In 2022 Salmon Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses was attacked in New York. He was stabbed several times and as a result lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

In 2021, an educator in West Yorkshire was teaching religious studies. ‘The lesson that sparked the controversy was designed, ironically, to explore issues of blasphemy and free speech, and of appropriate ways of responding to religious disagreements’ (Guardian 31 March). What triggered the subsequent furore? He showed a cartoon which may have been one of those originally published by Jyllands-Posten. ‘The school immediately suspended the teacher, and ‘unequivocally apologised’ for using a totally inappropriate resource, promising to review the curriculum with “all the communities represented in our school”’.

The teacher was forced to leave his post and is apparently still in hiding.

Ain’t religion wonderful.

DC

World View: Poverty entrenchment (2002)

From the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Poverty eradication” programmes in Africa only act to further entrench manufactured poverty

In Africa it has become imperatively fashionable for governments to embark upon “Poverty Eradication” programmes. It is an initiative forced upon them, as usual, by the World Bank and the IMF. And the rapidity with which the programme is gaining momentum is so great that it will be no surprise to see, in the foreseeable future, ministries being created to take charge of Poverty Eradication.

What is “Poverty Eradication”?

It is a term that the “experts” at the IMF/World Bank drawing rooms coined to add to two earlier terms – “Poverty Reduction” and “Poverty Alleviation”. In spite of the semantic differences of the three terms, they are meant to be one and the same and as such they are used interchangeably. By these terms the “experts” in the West and their cronies in the South simply mean helping the poor and vulnerable in society to get out of their poverty. To achieve this goal, they adopt a three-dimensional strategy. In the first place there is what they call “capacity building”. This concerns efforts at reaching out to the poor and sensitising them on their poverty. It stems from an arrogantly elitist and childishly paternalistic notion that the poor do not know that they are poor or why they are poor. So they sink huge sums into organising seminars and workshops during which they try to let the poor “realise their potentials”. But that the organisers are mere parrots repeating their masters’ voice is clearly discerned through the hollow and meaningless phrases they use anywhere in Africa that they meet – “civil society”‘; “grassroots groups”; “gender equality”; “empowerment”; “awareness”, etc.

The second strategy they use is what they call their “social service window”. Under this category such “social services” as erecting waiting sheds at village clinics and health centres; constructing dwarf-walled sheds to be used as classrooms; organising the villagers to dig pits to bury rubbish; periodic clean-up campaigns in and around the market or church or mosque etc, and are what they pursue.

The third component of poverty eradication programmes involves the provision of small-scale loans which they euphemistically call “grants” to groups or individuals. It takes two forms: in cash or in kind. The latter is realised through the provision, on credit, of a milling machine; a kiln (for pottery); a tractor or ploughing services and provision of imported seeds for those in agriculture; or providing biogas facilities to provide household fuel for lighting and cooking, etc.

The kitten gift 

There is a popular parable among the Dagbamba of northern Ghana which is similar to the story of the Trojan Horse. A man wanted to help out a friend who was going through hard times. He gave the poor fellow a kitten so he could sell it when it grew up. The poor man was very happy with the gift but it did not take any length of time for him to realise that the gift was after all a curse. He used whatever little money that came his way to buy milk for the kitten while he himself kept starving.

The poverty reduction/alleviation/eradication scheme tells a similar tale. In the first place the amount of cash and material devoted to the programme is usually appallingly infinitesimal. On the individual level, the amount of money loaned out to a person is always not enough to start a viable business. As such the money soon evaporates into thin air and the beneficiary is now left with the more burdensome task of repaying the loan. I saw this kind of situation myself when as an elected member of the municipal parliament in Tamale (Ghana) in the early 1990s, I organised the women of my constituency into a group. A NGO (the 31st December Women’s Movement) in collaboration with a financial institution in town, approached us with the aim of granting our women soft loans under the Poverty Eradication Scheme. The funds came from IFAD. Ten of our women were to benefit from the programme. However the NGO who were our benefactors would only assist us on condition that the tenth person was one of them (the NGO). Our women agreed. The amount per head was fifty thousand cedis, about US$70.00 at the time.

The whole programme ended with some of the beneficiaries being threatened with court action. None of them benefited from the project.

In Gambia it was recently reported that the micro finance officer, Mr Mohammed Jammeh, boasted that the Social Development Fund which is responsible for poverty alleviation had disbursed 3,022,275 dalasis to 6,129 individuals between 1999 and October 2001. This means that on average each person received less than 500 cedis, the equivalent of about $30. How can one start a business with less than $30?

The story is equally grim with groups or associations who are assisted collectively. Here the funding agencies normally make these groups to contribute an initial amount to which the benefactors add whatever they have to dispose of. The total amount is then used to set up the project – usually kilns for pottery; looms for weaving projects; food processing projects; ploughing services or even tractors, land, imported seeds (cowpea, cotton, cashew, etc). In most cases women are the beneficiaries or target groups. Contrary to the initial hopes that are whipped up by the donors, a good lot of these projects end up as white elephants. Those that get going usually benefit only the leadership of the target groups and the officials of the implementing agencies. But most often than not petty squabbles arise and eventually the projects collapse.

Competitive markets 

Even where a few projects manage to see the light of day, their relative successes are negated by the capitalist globalisation of production and distribution of products. Needless to say the end products of these poor, mostly rural, folk have to compete against goods dumped cheaply from the West. Here again the case of the women at the Nalung Weaving Project in Tamale reveals a lot. These women were trained to weave material for smocks. After the training they were sold looms on credit. Their main input for their business was thread which they could only buy from the capital, Accra, about 500km away. Two problems soon arose. First to sell at a price that would enable them to cover the cost of production meant that no-one would buy as it was seen to be rather exorbitant. Secondly the quality of the thread used, which was even imported, was of an inferior quality and consequently the cloth woven was far inferior to the type produced by the traditional weavers. Added to these was the presence, in the markets, of relatively very cheap second-hand clothes from the West.

In Gambia there is something similar taking place, at the Bakau Women’s Horticultural Project. These women toil morning and evening and produce vegetables. They all harvest at the same time and so prices are very low as a result of glut. Even the onions and shallots they produce are shunned in favour of onions from the Netherlands. No wonder therefore that the women keep marking time economically. As for those who are into cash crops such as cashew, cotton, cowpea, groundnuts etc, the least said about them, the better, considering the pitifully disadvantaged bargaining power of the producers of primary products (in the poor countries) under the current capitalist world economic arrangement.

Wasted energies

One other factor which needs highlighting in this hoax of poverty eradication is the magnitude of human resources deliberately channelled into such unproductive, in fact retrogressive work. Millions of people world-wide are enticed into taking part in this futile venture. Having been made poor by the system, the people, like a drowning man who will cling to a straw, keep flocking to the system only, each time, to be hoodwinked. But more agonising is the fact that people who champion this global ruse are the elite who, most often than not, know they are engaged in an activity which is worthless to the target groups. These elite are the staff of government ministries and agencies (NGOs). They pilfer items and embezzle funds meant for the projects in addition to their bloated salaries. In short they are used as willing tools in the entrenchment of poverty.

Ending poverty 

Experts of development studies are often heard saying that “the poor will always be with us”. That may be why we see the phrases “poverty alleviation”; “poverty reduction” and “poverty eradication” as being the same. Their confused use of terms gives expression to the real nature of the capitalist system – a system of legalised deceit and thievery.

But even what the sentence quoted above, tries to conceal is the fact that these poor that we have with us are growing in number and intensity. As more and more people join the class of the poor, the poverty grows worse and worse. In other words, global poverty is increasing both horizontally and vertically. All this, in spite of the alienation/reduction/eradication propaganda.

Poverty is caused by the unjust economic order prevailing in the world today. The wealth and resources of this world – land, factories, transport and communication, etc – are owned and controlled by a few people, who use these resources to make more wealth. They majority own nothing but their ability to produce. They are therefore forced to work for the few idle owners. These workers are paid wages just enough to keep them alive in order to continue to work.

As long as such production relations persist, more and more people will continue to join the ranks of the poor. For just as the IMF and the World Bank and the West give loans to poor countries in order to get them more into economic crisis, so do the peanuts these institutions trickle down as loans to poor women and groups only serve to deepen their poverty.

The only choice lies in a radical change in the ownership and control of the world’s wealth and resources. There must be collective rather than today’s minority ownership. Control over social wealth must be democratic with all having an equal say in the management, production and distribution of the products of human labour. Under such a system, everybody gets involved in determining what to produce; takes an active part in the production process; and finally has a free and equal access to goods and services. It is only then that poverty will be eradicated (not even alleviated nor reduced – empty phrases). Then there will be no room for some to have more than they need whilst others have less than they need. Attaining such a society is our collective responsibility.

Suhuyini

50 Years Ago: Upset in Accra: Dr. Nkrumah upsets his friends (2008)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1951 the Gold Coast legislature for the first time represented all the territory’s inhabitants, voting in secret ballot. The elections of 1951 and 1954 were won by the Convention People’s Party (CPP), whose leader, Dr. Nkrumah was brought from jail to fill the newly-created post of Prime Minister. The CPP stood on a programme of independence from British rule and when they won a third overwhelming victory in the 1956 elections, Whitehall agreed to the inevitable. At midnight on 5th March, 1957, the Gold Coast ceased to exist and the State of Ghana took its place. A new national anthem—Ghana Arise, by Hector Hughes, a British Labour M.P.—was substituted for God Save the Queen. ( . . .)

The first signs that Ghana was going to betray the hopes of its friends came when Dr. Nkrumah appeared to be fostering his own little personality cult, by having his head stamped on the new coinage and going to live in Christiansborg Castle which, as the old residence of Danish and British governors, is heavy with unpleasant memories. Then came the expulsions and a Special Bill to allow Mr. Edusei to deport two men without the right of appeal. The municipal councils of Accra and Kumasi were suspended and so was the chief of the 300,000 Akim Abuakwa tribe. Several members of the opposition were kidnapped and from the other side, a plot to assassinate Dr. Nkrumah was alleged. In this hysterical atmosphere, it seemed. Africa’s immaculate embryo democracy had been born a deformed dictatorship.

The truth of the matter is that last March saw the end of Nkrumah’s days of agitation and faced him with the realities of power over a country which is trying to make its way in the capitalist world. The first reality was a staggering fall in the price of cocoa, so that the first budget was chillingly austere and the Ghanaian workers were told that it would be unpatriotic to ask for higher-wages. They had expected better than this from Nkrumah ; a national transport strike was called and rioting broke out in Accra. Another difficulty is that Nkrumah is struggling to establish government on modern capitalist lines and to stamp out the old system of tribal rule.

(from article by Ivan in Socialist Standard, January 1958)

Financial wizards or great pretenders? (2001)

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1990s when, under the cunning guidance of the IMF and the World Bank, the Ghanaian people were literally being strangled by the Economic Recovery Programme of the Structural Adjustment Programme, the financial advisers to President Jerry Rawlings always managed to conjure figures and statistics which indicated that the economy was doing excellently well. These statistics not only earned Ghana the epithet “darling state” of the West but Rawlings himself was so glad with his economists that he bestowed upon the title “financial wizards”. But the truth is that these accolades were for the purpose of damage control. Rawlings knew deep within his heart that his “wizards” were in reality great pretenders like himself as together they had been stashing away huge sums in foreign banks.

The history of the struggle for economic development in Africa and the forces dictating the pace thereof are not in the least different from the scenario that the West, Rawlings and the economic advisers enacted in Ghana.

Groping in the dark

Immediately African countries were pronounced independent by the colonial masters, the leaders rolled up their sleeves and set to the arduous task of nation-building. Although a few may have seemed to genuinely have the welfare of the masses at heart, many of these leaders and their ministers were deeply engaged in stomach politics. Be that as it may, these leaders, day in day out, saw the plight of the masses getting worse and worse.

A great number of African countries became independent in the sixties. This period also happened to be the peak of the so-called “cold war”. The West and the East struggled to control these newly-independent nations to enhance their (West and East) own economic interests. The result was that these African countries found themselves in a kind of trial-and-error methods of trying to extricate themselves from growing poverty.

At first the state got involved in business by setting up marketing boards. These bought up cash crops from the farmers and exported them. The state thus acted as a middleman. The state also created development boards, authorities and corporations in the hope of making money to move their countries forward. In some extreme cases some governments resorted to outright nationalisation of private business. However all these efforts by no means arrested the downward trend in the living standards of the masses. They still paid dearly for imports and received peanuts for their exports.

To overcome this problem of high prices of imports, the policy of import substitution was introduced. By this, companies producing such imported commodities as milk, beverages, matches, canned foods, bottled drinks, etc were encouraged to come and establish factories and carry out production here in Africa. Many companies responded positively but the outcome of this policy was a deepening impoverishment of the masses. They served as cheap labour in these factories. In fact only a few could afford to furnish their families with the commodities they got involved in producing. African leaders were baffled as what tended to happen was that nothing happened. No wonder there were lots of attempts at and successful coups d’état during the sixties and seventies.

It was during this period of beating about the bush for economic direction that the IMF and the World Bank joined in the fray. They came along with a novel package that was going to miraculously propel African economies to the highest degree of development. This new policy was the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). This SAP idea condemned the previous method of development as unworkable and maintained instead that making structural changes, including the expansion and re-orientation of production, was the only way forward. African nations were to put the production of “non-traditional exports” and tourism into a higher gear. Thus in a country like Ghana where the traditional exports were mainly cocoa, timber and gold, under the SAP crops like pepper, pineapples, yams, maize, and oranges were to be turned into cash crops and exported. SAP also stipulated that private capital was to be the “engine of growth” and that “governments have no business doing business”. It did not however take long for the people to understand that they were once again fooled by official policy. Hardship and suffering increased a thousandfold. The masses had been moved from the frying pan into the fire.

Today the SAP is still the invisible hand directing affairs at our finance ministries in the interests of the owners of the World Bank and the IMF and to the detriment of the masses of Africa. However this time around there is a formidable group of foot soldiers preparing the grounds for, facilitating implementation and soothing the pains of these anti-people policies. These are the NGOs. There are hordes of them in every African country. All the misinformation propagated in the form of catchy phrases and slogans by the IMF and WB are picked up unquestioningly by these NGOs and parroted all over the place. The NGOs assist governments in deceiving the people by embarking on projects which are either white elephants or never even take off the ground. Meanwhile the wealthy companies keep selling their obsolete equipment to Africa in the name of appropriate technology.

Socialists or capitalists?

On Thursday 23 August the BBC Focus On Africa programme broadcast the news that Jose Edouardo dos Santos of Angola had announced that he would not be standing for re-election in he next presidential elections. Interestingly the BBC referred to the man as a “former Marxist”. This reminded me of others like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and a host of them who were also said to be “Marxists” by which they meant “communists” or “socialists”. Of course the West and East tagged these people thus for obvious reasons—whereas the West saw the as “dangerous”, the East considered them “good boys”. But the truth is that none of these leaders who championed the struggle for independence actually understood the global system. At best they only had hazy and confused ideas of soviet-style “socialism” (state capitalism). And, sadly, the present crop of leaders are even more bankrupt and myopic than their predecessors. If so, who gave the precursors advice and who advises the current leaders?

On the attainment of independence many African countries still depended on the former colonial masters for advice and guidance. In fact this is true of most of the francophone nations. Others, like Gamel Nasser’s Egypt, Nkrumah’s Ghana and Sekou Toure’s Guinea were so radical (though not revolutionary) that they openly castigated the West and courted the friendship of the former USSR. But in reality they did not escape the domineering influence of the existing global economic system since the East also practised capitalism. The finance ministers and economic advisers thought there were differences between the West and East in their theories and strategies for development and that thinking was partly responsible for the trial-and-error methods of development the newly-independent countries adopted – they were just variations of the same rule of capital.

The situation is different is different today. There are thousands of “experts” working day and night in seemingly harmless institutions and commissions and advising governments on their economic policies. The IMF and WB are still the main determinants of the path African economies must chart. But in order to lend some credence to their nefarious activities, they keep creating, from behind the scenes, economic institutions which are outwardly African in nature. And even if the IMF and WB have no hands in the creation of some of such institutions, they still manage to control them by picking up some of their bills. These bodies serve as economic think-tanks and advisers to governments. Some of them even assist in soliciting loans for governments. These include the Economic Commission for Africa; Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS); African Development Bank (ADB); Southern African Development Committee (SADEC);West African Monetary Institute, etc. There are groups spearheaded by individuals like Adebayo Adedeji, Julius Nyerere and others. The experts in these institutions hold regular meetings not to seek genuine ways and means of salvaging the African masses but, pretenders as they are, to wine, dine and go home with per diems which are sometimes higher than the monthly salaries of employees in the high income category. They waste huge quantities of paper-producing volumes of reports which sit on shelves gathering dust. But even if these “experts” are genuinely engaged in helping, their efforts will always come to nil.

The reason is that like their bosses in the IMF and World Bank, they are trying to reform a system which is inherently flawed. The system in operation in today’s world is profit oriented. Every idea put across and every step taken is to make profit not to satisfy human needs. Based on money, the belief is that without money nothing can work. Therefore governments are advised and sometimes coerced to take loans. The few with big money invest in our countries. Since investors are looking for profits the end result is that the human and material resources are mercilessly plundered.

But the truth is that production is carried out by people not money. Problems are solved by human beings, not money. The main problems Africans face are food, healthcare, shelter, education, clothes, and so on. These are produced by human labour acting on natural resources,. Africa has more than enough of these human and natural resources but because they system is based on money, these resources are accessible to only those who have money. These are a negligible minority who own all the means of production and distribution of wealth. But since they will use their wealth to produce only what will fetch them more money, they may produce what people do not need. For instance vast tracts of land are used to cultivate cash crops like tobacco, cashew, and cocoa for factories in the West yet what we need more here are maize, rice and other food crops. These latter are not very profitable so despite their importance, they are not produced. This is capitalism.

Any hope for Africa?

In the increasing problems facing Africans are a result of the economic arrangement in which every action is determined by money and profit, then the surest way of arresting the sorry situation is doing away with money. This is only possible on a global basis. The profit system is universal and so getting it off our backs requires the concerted efforts of the global working class not just in Africa, Asia or Europe. When the means of production and distribution of wealth pass from private ownership to collective ownership then the products will also be collectively shared. People will, in this higher and humane system of ownership, willingly contribute whatever efforts they are capable of providing since they know they can freely take from the produce how much they need. In this new social organisation money will have no place and all institutions and people related to money like markets, banks, credit cards, cheques, tickets, bills, accountants, cashiers, sales-girls, etc, etc will vanish. The people engaged here will be available to get involved in the real work of producing clothes, food, medicines, education, etc. This is socialism.

However, this civilised system of production relations can only materialise when the majority get to understand it and want it implemented. It is only then that Africa and the whole world will rid itself of pretenders posing as financial wizards.

Suhuyini

“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

The Passing Show: May Day, May Day (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the May 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

May Day, May Day

Definitions: (1) A radio distress signal, repeated at rapid intervals, for ships at sea. (2) A working class distress signal, repeated at yearly intervals. It's the second definition which concerns us. You want me to justify it? Of course it’s not the way that Labourites and other left wingers will look at it when they assemble once again this year for their processions. To them it will be a fine opportunity to make the usual protestations of “solidarity’’, “peace”, “progress" and so on, with workers abroad which, for all the fire and eloquence with which they may be delivered, will be vague, empty, and not worth the ink that's used to print them in the next day’s newspapers.

May Day demonstrations began with the passing of a resolution by the Second International Working Men’s Association in 1889 to set aside the First of May as a workers holiday, so that mass demonstrations could be made to affirm the international solidarity of labour. But solidarity for what? Workers may have avowed such solidarity in 1889, but there was precious little of it in 1914, except perhaps in the only place where nationality didn’t count—in the grave. It has been the same story many times since then to some extent or another, yet down the years the farce of the May Day ritual has been observed.

But a “distress signal” I called it. Well, take a look at some of the things they will be talking about this time. Vietnam? Wages? The Bomb? Pensions? Housing? A superficial conclusion might be that the scope of May Day has broadened since the early days, yet really all these issues can be put under the headings of War and The Poverty of Labour, both inseparable from capitalism and very distressing indeed. Taken collectively they represent a massive S.O.S., a cry for help from a working class floundering in a sea of bewilderment. But the orators who thump the tubs in Hyde Park and elsewhere are just as ignorant as the listening crowds of the way to answer the cry. There is a lifeline which is there for the grasping, but it cannot be thrown by such as the Labour and Communist Parties; it is the lifeline of Socialist knowledge. When the working class have reached out for that, in no time at all they can haul themselves high, dry and safe, to a new world.

Sing, Bing

The wheel has turned a full cycle and Mr. Geoffrey Bing, Q.C. is back in Britain again. This is the man who was once Labour MP for Hornchurch and who climbed aboard the Ghanaian bandwagon when it began to roll some years ago, becoming Dr. Nkrumah’s principal legal adviser. He wasn't the only one to support that vicious and repressive regime of course, but although the two press interviews he gave at the end of March were noteworthy for the evasiveness of his replies to questions, at least he did say something. The other individuals and organisations in this country who hailed the new state, and incidentally sneered at us for refusing it our blessing, have all been conspicuously silent.

Now, what did our ex-Labour hero have lo say when he got back home? If we accept his version at its face value, whoever was to blame for the disturbing things that went on during Nkrumah's reign, it was certainly not Mr. Bing. He was “not there” when the notorious Preventive Detention Bill was announced in the Ghana Parliament. He was “ill” at the time of Nkrumah’s removal of the Chief Justice, and so on . . . He didn’t say what he was doing in November 1963, when the Preventive Detention Act was amended to increase considerably the government’s already harsh powers. He does seem to have learned, though, how unpleasant prison can be (“the actual physical conditions of prisons in Ghana are deplorable”), and how nasty it is to be “manhandled by soldiers” (his wife had that experience). Perhaps some of the five-year detainees could have told him all about those sorts of things if they’d been let out in time. However, that’s the snag with supporting dictatorships; the boomerang sometimes hits you before you have time to get out of the way.

“I have supported ideas and not individuals,” said Mr. Bing on March 28 in a final disclaimer. Ah, yes. Thats the crux of the whole matter, and if Mr. Bing had not said it, we would have had to say it for him. indeed he has supported ideas, and always the wrong ones just like every other Labour MP. True, not every member of his former party would be a deliberate supporter of dictatorships just like that, but so long as capitalism lasts, there is always the threat of it sometime, somewhere. And no capitalist politician can ever be entirely above suspicion in that respect. Even the best of intentions are derided and destroyed in the capitalist jungle, so that the democrat of today (perhaps without realising it at the time) is often a trainee for the dictatorship of tomorrow.

This is where we came in

Take heart, Lord Robens and others Who supported nationalisation of the mines in 1947. You think you have problems with falling coal demand and competition from oil? Well, so have others: this time it’s the West German coal owners who are running into trouble and are actually being paid by their government to take pits out of production. On March 17th, The Guardian described the Bonn government’s actions as “. . . measures . . . designed to help the coal industry to adjust itself to the realities of industrial life.” Which is a nice way of saying “no profit—no production”, no matter if some people do go short of warmth this winter. Incidentally, it does illustrate one point contrary to Tory claims; and that is that the profitability of an industry is not realty affected by whether it’s nationalised. It’s the current market conditions that count.

But don’t get too shocked or surprised at the news from Germany, will you. Governments often act in this way. A few years back, the British textile industry got the treatment, and before that American agriculture. Yet there are plenty of ill clothed and ill fed people around, aren’t there? Profit is the raison d'etre as far as capitalism is concerned, not human need.

Gaspers

“Just because you caught me polishing my Rolls-Royce doesn’t mean I’m a Tory. I'll vote Labour.” (Man at Morden Hill. Guardian report 16.3.66.)

‘‘While we act to suppress the ugly activities, if anyone dies we shall not be bothered." (Indian Premier Mrs. Gandhi. 16.3.66.)

"He (the Tory) must persuade a substantial mass of the voters . . . to identify the defence of their own interests and values with the defence of privileges which are—and are likely to remain—beyond their reach." (Why I am voting Tory, by Henry Fairlie. Observer 20.3.66.)

"A Conservative speculative builder in Cambourne this weekend described Mr. Wilson as "the nearest thing we’ve had to Churchill." (Peter Jenkins, Guardian 21.3.66.)

"I have a feeling that . . . voters are getting much more shrewd.' (Leonard Beaton. Guardian 30.3.66.)

Capitalism rips us off, NGOs soothe the pain (2000)

From the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

When governments and business have done with keeping us in line and exploiting us, NGOs step in to soothe us with left-overs

“Give us fish and you feed us for a day, Give us the fishing rod and you feed us for life”

Non-governmental organisations in general come in to assist where governments fail. Today however many of them claim they are now shifting their focus to the economic development of poor countries. But it is common knowledge, from the concrete situation on the ground, that the main thrust of NGO activity is still within the framework of alleviation and not eradication of poverty and want. And even in that regard, a cursory glance at their intervention reveals nothing but a catalogue of failures and deceit. But what else is expected of any organisation that tries to reform a system which is inherently evil and incorrigible? In this article three reasons are advanced to explain why NGOs are like the proverbial decorated donkey which is “still an ass”.

The unholy trinity

Even if NGOs were groups genuinely seeking, on humanitarian grounds, to reach out to the needy (as some may honestly do) they would still not escape being branded blind groups groping in the dark. But a closer scrutiny of the entire NGO set-up reveals almost a sinister plot against the wretched of the earth—those whose suffering they claim to be alleviating. This is easily understood when one considers the life and role of the NGO as being largely determined by a three-dimensional interplay of forces.

To begin with, it is evident that governments, big business and NGOs constitute the three sides of a triangle. The three are one and their efforts are complementary. Are we in the poor peripheral countries not constantly reminded, both in the print and electronic media, of some three “basic facts”?

(a) that government has no business doing business, that government only provides an “enabling environment” for free trade,

(b) that the business community, aka Foreign Direct Investment, aka private sector is the key to, and the engine of, our economic development,

(c) and that NGOs are partners in development, the third estate of African economic development.

In real terms what the three propositions mean is that whilst governments keep the people in check with their armies, police, prisons, the judiciary, etc, the capitalists rip us off through exploitation and retrenchment. The NGOs then intervene to soothe, console and cajole the victims with sweets and second-hand (discarded) materials.

Though this unholy collaboration is done in a discreetly Mafia-like style, it is not uncommon, once in a while, to see such back-scratching manifested openly. A case was seen in Ghana in the mid-1990s, when an NGO—The 31st December Women’s Movement—diverted huge sums of aid money to the ruling NDC government to foot its electioneering campaign bills. Another example of this government/NGO collaboration is the issue of World Vision International helping the Honduran government to track down and kill suspected dissidents (Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty, London, 1989). Where NGOs fail, to fulfil their part of the unwritten connivance, governments do not hesitate to take firm measures against such NGOs. In 1989, for instance, when Oxfam advocated sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa, it (Oxfam) was censured by the England and Wales Charity Commission for contravening UK charity law. Then in 1995 the Ghanaian government was bitterly confronted by the opposition for trying to impose an NGO Act on the people. The law was meant to boot out all NGOs which were not subservient to the government. In a similar vein, NGOs are known to be promoters of big business through the purchase of (sometimes expired) drugs and food and also obsolete or faulty machinery. It is on record for instance that Bob Geldof’s Band Aid wasted $4 million in purchasing eighty unusable lorries from a Kuwaiti business group and dumped the junk as aid to Sudan (Independent, 25 November 1987).

Fund raising

The second dimension to the three-pronged characteristics of the NGO system relates to their source of funds. It is an undeniable fact that individuals filled with fellow feeling donate to NGOs to assist the needy. However, large sums do come from owners of capital, corporate bodies and governments. The donations of these latter, like “aid” in a profit-oriented society, are not without ulterior motives and strings. Who pays the piper calls the tune and even since one does not bite the finger that feeds one, whatever well-meaning intentions that motivated the setting up of the NGO is sooner or later compromised in favour of having more funds. They would henceforth dance to the tune of “major” donors and benefactors.

Such tendencies reduce many an NGO to a complete business enterprise where “profit” now their major concern. This is expressed in the methods employed to attract funding. Advertising is an expression of an unwholesome competition in the quest for profits. NGOs spend huge sums on adverts. Sometimes this is done using typical capitalist fraudulent methods. A clear example is the famous “wire fraud” of World Vision International, on the Los Angeles-based relief agency Operation California. The latter had organised a fundraising concert for Kampuchea refugees which was televised by CBS. Unknown to the organisers WVI had managed to have its toll-free number flashed at regular intervals during the concert for potential donors to pay into that account (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, 21-27 December 1982).

Another dishonest method of ensuring a bumper harvest is the raising of false alarms through a gross exaggeration of the plight of “vulnerable groups”. In the NGO business the commodity is the misery of the downtrodden. So intense is this hunt for super-profits that the bugbear of unhealthy rivalry (typical of big business) often raises its ugly head within the NGO community. Part of the causes of the Somali famine in the late 1980s , for instance, was a result of the refusal by relief groups to heed Oxfam’s fully substantiated warning of imminent hunger. These agencies rejected the warning just so that Oxfam would not take the credit (Lords of Poverty).

The result of this business-oriented voluntarism is the tendency to accumulate. The recent imprisonment of Allan Boesak in South Africa for embezzling NGO funds is only the tip of the iceberg. There is also the case of International Christian Aid (ICA) a US-based NGO, which was accused, in 1985, by the UN and the US State Department of failing to send anything to Ethiopia though it had raised $18 million for famine there (Daily Mail, 14 January 1985). Many more monstrous cases of this nature are either not discovered or hushed up in the interests of the dubious capitalist fraternity. Thus set up to help the needy NGOs often only help themselves.

Activities

Needless to say, the work and assistance programmes of NGOs cannot be anything but a red herring. Having been brought into existence by the exploitative money-oriented system and being completely dependent on the same underhand methods of this unfeeling system for their survival what else can the activities of NGOs be if not messing about in trivialities? The main problem confronting humanity revolves around ownership of the means and instruments for producing and distributing (social) wealth. How many NGOs mount platforms to explain this simple truth to their target groups? How many NGOs ever distribute tracts about working people replacing this profit-oriented system with a higher social system based on collective and democratic ownership of the means and instruments of production?

It is not by accident therefore that NGO activities in poor southern countries never approach education, shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, etc with a view to finding a lasting solution to them. These areas are the exclusive lucrative business of private capital. A good lot of NGO programmes involve organisation of seminars and talk-shops on such superstructural issues such as female circumcision, the empowerment of women, prostitution, drug abuse, etc. Most of the relatively few projects end up as white elephants or never even get complete. No wonder then that as the number of NGOs keeps rising, ignorance, homelessness, hunger, poverty, disease, etc are getting out of control (instead of the other way round).

Of course poverty and want are necessary offshoots of the capitalist socio-economic formation. Trying to get rid of the former whilst leaving the latter intact amounts to putting the cart before the horse. The only genuine assistance the NGO community could lead to the suffering people of this capitalist world is to stop collaborating with the owners of capital and instead, join forces with socialists to get rid of this system based on money. NGOs could use their resources to help usher in a system where production is not for profits’ sake but for the satisfaction of needs. Under such a system nobody will have to run around begging for funds in order to help the needy—in fact there wouldn’t be any more needy people.

Suhuyini Nbang-Ba, 

Gambia

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

Black nationalism in Africa (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationalism as a political theory originated in Germany around the beginning of the 19th century, when the German nationalists put forward the theory that those who speak the same language form a natural community which ought to govern itself.

This was to develop into racialism and to give rise to talk of the “Anglo-Saxon race ” and the “German race".

Despite the fact that nationalism has no scientific basis for its claims, it has been a powerful force in the world. Of course, it was not something which suddenly appeared out of the blue; its roots are to be found in the beginnings of capitalist development in Britain and France and the effect this had on intellectual life in Germany. This put Germany in a peculiar historical position.

Germans who had absorbed ideas developed in Britain and France turned to nationalism—the unity of all German speaking people—as part of the drive to modernise their country. Similar nationalist movements and theories appeared in Poland, Italy and Hungry, though only in Italy was the movement to have success in the nineteenth century. Here the achievement of national unity and independence was the equivalent of France’s revolution of 1789; it created the political conditions in which the evolution of capitalist society could continue.

In short in many of those countries which underwent capitalist development after Britain and France, the overthrow of the old order was represented as a form of national revolution—in some cases as a move for national unity, in others for national independence and in others for national regeneration. To refer to nationalism as a weapon of the social revolution from feudal society to capitalism is not to say that the nationalist movements were composed of traders and small factory owners. In fact the relationship is not as simple as this.

Capitalism created the social conditions for the spread of nationalism by alienating sections of the population from the old order. It is among this section—students, past and present, modern army officers and wage workers — that nationalists were to be found. These set about agitating among those they considered their fellow nationals in order to awaken their national consciousness.

From Europe, nationalism spread out during the twentieth century to the Middle East and Asia. Today it is spreading through Africa—Macmillan’s wind of change. The outward form of this nationalism varies from country to country depending on historical circumstances, but its essential remains the same; it is an instrument of the capitalist social revolution in relatively backward countries

In Europe the nationalist theories were based on language. In Africa they are based on colour and “race”. For this reason African nationalism is sometimes referred to as “racist ”. This use is permissible in so far as African nationalism does claim to champion the interests of the black people or “race”. Perhaps a better term would be Black Nationalism; this however should not obscure the fact that there are groups working among Africans which do preach race hatred and race domination. These can be called Black Racialist groups.

The intellectual roots of African nationalism go back to the Negro nationalist movements which appeared in America and the West Indies in the first part of this century. These ranged from openly black racialist organisations such as that of Marcus Garvey — the forerunner of the present day Black Muslims in America and the Rastafarians in Jamaica — to the cultural nationalism, so-called negritude, of the poet Aimé Césaire.

From this developed the doctrine of Pan-Africanism, which proclaimed the unity of interest of all Africans and those of African descent. Educated Africans and African students abroad joined in this movement. On returning to Africa, the students set about agitating for national independence. They would have had no success had not social conditions been ripe for the spread of their ideas.

As in Europe and Asia, nationalism in Africa spread only to the degree that the old order was breaking up. The colonial powers, in training Africans as soldiers and priests and civil servants, in employing them in the mines and on the plantations, undermined their own position. For these detribalised Africans formed the social base of the anti-colonialist struggle. Since the war the further break-up of the old order has proceeded apace. So has nationalism. It is only nine years since the first black African state, Ghana, became independent from colonial rule. Now, with the important exceptions of parts of central and southern Africa, most of black Africa has achieved independence.

The regimes that have taken over from the colonial governments have been various. Some have consisted of a motley collection of tribal leaders and opportunist and corrupt politicians. Others have an iron handed industrialising clique. Ghana provides the model of this last type; there the administrative techniques of Russia have been combined with the doctrine of Pan-Africanism to get what Nkrumah calls "African socialism ”.

Other nations which are modelled on Ghana — Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania — are one party states in which a vanguard party is used to mobilise the population for carrying through the capitalist social revolution. Because of the role of the state —and the influence of Russia—it was perhaps inevitable that these regimes would label themselves socialist. In fact they are totalitarian state capitalist regimes in which an élite uses the state power to try to extend capitalism rapidly throughout the area under their political control.

The situation in central and southern Africa is complicated by the presence of a not inconsiderable minority of persons of European descent. These—the whites—once enjoyed certain political and economic privileges at the expense of the Africans. It is in these circumstances that ugly black-white clashes have occurred and will almost certainly occur again. Among both white people and black there are groups preaching race hatred and intolerance. Many of the white workers are under the impression that they can preserve their security through discriminatory legislation. The African workers, on the other hand, see the solution to their miseries in African nationalism. The murders of Mau Mau in Kenya, and those of the Congo rebels, are examples of nationalism in action, just as the terrorist tactics employed by European nationalists in the past were. In Africa, however, they are now complicated as a clash between black and white.

African nationalism and the one party regimes it tends to set up are respectively the theory and practice of the capitalist social revolution in Africa. The spread of African nationalism together with the attempt by the Whites to maintain their privileges, is almost .certain to lead to further inter-racial violence and terror. Nationalism, with its talk of equality, may not at first sight appear as repugnant as racialism pure and simple. It often however, has the same results: bloodshed in which members of the working class are killed—not for their own interests but for those of their masters present and future.

Adam Buick

World View: Out of Africa? (1998)

From the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received a long contribution from journalist Chido Onumah who is the co-ordinator for Nigeria of the West African Human Rights Committee. We publish below the key points together with our comments.

“Washington has been too willing to downplay democracy and human rights for the sake of natural resources or diplomatic alliances”, the New York Times wrote in its editorial of 20 March 1998. Clearly, nobody is better placed to serve this purpose of giving access to Africa’s natural resources and providing a base in support of US diplomatic alliances than the various mad men who have sprung up (often with the help of Washington) within Africa and much of the developing world.

The US supported Mobutu after killing Lumumba and scuttling Congo’s burgeoning democracy; and Mobutu provided a buffer against Washington’s longest standing bogeyman, the USSR. Today, the US has found it convenient to recant and is calling for democracy in the new Democratic Republic of Congo. On February 4 1966, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup. The result was the abortion of Ghana’s fledgling democracy. More than three decades after, the country is still grappling with the rudiments of democracy under a military dictator that is making a travesty of democracy, yet Washington is contented and applauding that “democracy is spreading”.

Just name it! Where has Washington stepped into that she has not messed up? The US-supported Marcos and his murderous gang; provided a slaughter slab for the butcher of Uganda, Idi Amin; aborted democracy in Chile and installed the hydra-headed monster, Pinochet; wrecked Haiti, courtesy of the Duvalier clan. In all these places, the US was looking for a mad man who would preside over the wholesale transfer of natural resources to America’s multinationals and do her dirty job in its so-called war with communism. Nothing mattered beyond the immediate economic and political gains of Washington. Not even the sight of mutilated bodies of defenceless and innocent kids who were victims of the dastardly actions of such scum as Jonas Savimbi and his cohorts who were armed and financed by the US could move her to change her position.

The American society is a predatory society and it can survive only by aggressively expanding and conquering new markets from which to extract profit. What Washington aims at creating in West Africa, as in other areas that are under its sphere of influence, is a club of IMF/World Bank puppets. The reason is simple. West African despots—as always quislings of America and her Western accomplices—who mutate into civilian presidents make all the difference between the acceptance or rejection of the West’s obnoxious economic policies and by extension, the survival or collapse of their businesses. The examples of Ghana, Burkina Faso and The Gambia are indicative of this trend. The IMF/World Bank and their host governments cannot be too sure what the “new man” would do (a case of the devil you know); so why not support a Jerry Rawlings, Blaise Campaore or Yahya Jammeh even where their transition to civil rule succeeds only in furthering neo-patrimonialism. As one of the puppets of international monopoly capital, Washington is sure Abacha will execute structural adjustment, devaluation, privatisation and such other infernal policies the IMF/World Bank may deem necessary to recommend for Nigeria’s underdevelopment. This support and manipulation of Abacha is necessary to prevent the toiling masses from uniting in a revolution that would threaten international monopoly capital.

The basic fallout of Mr Clinton’s visit to Africa is that the world would move into the new century with all the prejudices, including the onslaught of imperialism (courtesy of America) which have made the 20th century a nightmare. It is difficult to imagine what could be a greater threat to world peace in the new millennium than the American establishment which is nothing but a scourge. Fanon wrote that every generation must discover its mission. Africa’s emergent activists, from Cape Coast to Cairo, must enter the new millennium boldly determined to confront the monster of imperialism. Those who are ready to liberate Africa from the clutches of poverty, illiteracy and general underdevelopment and expand the frontiers of democracy cannot look up to the West, America particularly. They must be ready to struggle for these rights. Apologies from the great-grand-children of slave traders would not serve any purpose. In fact, the US has committed too many grave crimes against the African continent that apologies would only serve to obfuscate these crimes.

Imperialism is like the common cold; you either fight it or go to bed with it. There cannot be half measures or a middle course. This is a new era in which people, particularly exploited people, do not look up to any godfather. Certainly, the US will fail in Nigeria as she failed in Vietnam, Cuba and everywhere else she has sought to extend her bloody fang.

Chido Onumah, 

Ghana

Reply: 

We fully accept that American foreign policy is determined by economic (trade, investments, raw materials) and strategic considerations, but so is that of every other capitalist country. To single out America for special opposition is to play the game either of other capitalist powers (such as Britain, France, Germany, Japan, China, etc) or of some would-be African ruling class.

We have to say too that we cannot accept that Ghana under Nkrumah or the Congo under Lumumba were examples of “burgeoning democracy”. Certainly, both Nkrumah and Lumumba were anti-US imperialism but they were not democrats either in practice or in theory. They favoured and tried to establish one-party regimes, on the model that then existed in Russia. In fact, they perfectly illustrate our point above about opposition to one particular “imperialist” power playing the game of its rivals—in their time, “anti-imperialism” was the ideology under which state-capitalist Russia sought to further its economic and strategic interests.

If we have put the word “imperialism” in the previous paragraph in inverted commas this is because we don’t accept Lenin’s theory of imperialism (which sees the struggle at world level as being between imperialist and anti-imperialist forces) with its implication that “imperialism” is something different and worse than capitalism. World capitalism, not the “imperialism” of particular capitalist powers, is the cause of the problems workers all over the world suffer from, and the solution to the problems of workers in Africa lies not in kicking American imperialism out of Africa but in uniting with workers in the rest of the world to replace the world capitalist system by world socialism. This is the aim of the World Socialist Movement. –Editors.