Africa in Search of a New Mode of Politics (1994)

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This essay was originally published in the book African Perspectives on Development in 1994 by St. Martin’s Press, edited by Ulf Himmelstrand, Kabiru Kinyanjui & Edward Mburugu.

Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba was an intellectual and revolutionary from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a professor of history at the prestigious University of Dar es Salaam for most of his life. He was imprisoned from 1982-1983 and persecuted by the Mobutu Sese Seko regime. He was also elected to lead an armed rebellion in 1998 by the Rally for Congolese Democracy, a political party and rebel group, against Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the then dictator of the DRC. Wamba died from Covid-19 on July 15, 2020.¹

Wamba’s essay provides an excellent application of the Lazarusian framework in order to understand politics in Africa in the twentieth century. Much of his analysis on the persistence of colonial relations in post-colonial societies is continuous with other figures like Walter Rodney, but Wamba adds a critique of the statization of politics in general in the twentieth century, and especially in the Marxist socialist states. Embracing the thesis of the crisis of Marxism and Lazarus’s concept of historical modes of politics, he explores the exhaustion of the national liberation movements in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Wamba’s warning that, “we are headed towards a prolonged world political crisis”, has borne out in the twenty-first century with the exhaustion of liberal democracy, the rise of fascism, and the difficulties of producing a new emancipatory politics today.²

Introduction

We are living in a period of political crisis. Emancipatory (revolutionary or progressive) politics rooted in the fundamental masses of people — workers and poor peasants — is no longer incarnated by the existing dominant historical modes of politics. Theories of human and social emancipation and the practices they imply have suddenly become inoperative. This worldwide crisis has come to the fore with, among other things, the completion of the “crisis of Marxism”³; the breakdown of socialist states in Eastern Europe; the defeat of the Tiananmen insurrection⁴ against Dengist modernist desocialization⁵; the defeat of the Sandinistas as in Nicaragua; and the re-emergence in Africa, of uprisings of the masses (for democracy, or in bread riots etc.) against the IMF and World Bank supervised state paternalist or populist developmentalism.

We are in a period of crisis of the dominant historical modes of politics which have organized political processes since the nineteenth century. A mode of politics⁶ is the specific way a particular politics functions as a process, as a system of decision-making, as practices and as an ideology internal to this process. Two dominant historical modes of politics have been specified: the parliamentarian mode of politics — which includes liberal democracy — and the Stalinian or Third International mode of politics. Neither the parliamentarian mode, nor the vanguard revolutionary party based Stalinian mode, support a process of human and social emancipation today. Mass enthusiasm for both modes has increasingly faded away.

Very briefly, the parliamentarian mode of politics subordinates parties under the state consensus. Ultimately, politics is reduced to a matter of numbers: the right of more votes is the foundation of its legality and legitimation. Politics is identified with the mere form of institutions (also called civil liberties) seen as mediations of freedom. Parties, in this mode, are not political organizations (i.e. operations of the internal conditions of political consciousness) but state organizations competing in the distribution of state positions.⁷ They are internal to constitutions and operate on the basis of, and through, the constitutional and state system. Politics is, thus, reduced and geared to the occupation of state posts — and not their destruction. Multi-partyism defines, thus, a type of state. No guarantee is built in to force the state to be accountable to the large masses of people except through elections with long intervals.

The Stalinian mode of politics emerged after the end of the Bolshevik mode of politics⁸ (defined as politics under conditions of revolutionary political consciousness) which existed from 1902-17. This mode ended with the armed insurrection of October 1917 which led to the seizure of state power and the transformation of the party into an organ of management of the socialist state. The Stalinian mode is not the same thing as the Soviet Union under Stalin (Stalinism); it refers to a politics, independent of the state, which existed through parties linked to the Third International — a formalist deviation from the Bolshevik mode, in which the revolutionary party is viewed as the condition of revolutionary political consciousness. Politics, in this mode, is thus referred to the party; the party is finally, revolutionary politics and revolutionary politics is the party. Ultimately, politics is reduced to the organization or the building of the party. In the absence of socialism in a country, one must at least have a revolutionary organization, the party: “If you want to make a revolution, you must have a revolutionary party.”

This mode — which subordinates politics under the idea of the One: One Class, One Party, One State — makes the party, as “a detachment of the proletariat”, into the political consciousness of proletarian politics.

Politics is confined to the party and the party as an organization is seen as the very content of that ideology. As the party is presented as the source of political truth, the Stalinian mode requires the credibility of the party. It is understandable that, in a workers’ state there was a unitary equation: the state equals the party; making party adherence identical with submission to the state and consensus, if not unanimity. The notion of the state of the whole people is related to that position. People’s thinking, all forms of consciousness not in line with the party, have to be suppressed. This was the basis of the purification of the party through purges, but space does not allow me to develop this further.

In the context of the bipolar world⁹, of super-power struggles for world hegemony, and of the Cold War, the link between both modes of politics and people’s emancipation was gradually broken. The modes tended to become bases of political alignment in their respective opposite camps. The politics of alliances in the so-called “Free World” was organized on the basis of the parliamentarian mode and the socialist world (including those aspiring to be socialists) had its politics organized around the Stalinian mode of politics. Antagonism and crises connected with the bipolar world led ultimately to the abandonment of progressive and emancipatory politics. The basic needs and aspirations of the large masses of people ceased to be the objective basis of the modes of politics. The latter became formal political formulas being transferred and/or imposed on peripheral allies. Experiences of democracy-from-above and non-capitalist paths of development, or those of socialist-oriented states or movements could be understood in this perspective. With the deconstruction of the welfare state in Western countries, the crisis of their mode of politics came to the fore. The rise of bureaucratic socialism, its crisis and collapse, revealed the crisis of the Stalinian mode of politics. It became possible in the West militarily to impose democracy on a country (e.g. Panama). The military’ protection of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, by the Soviet Union, pointed to the abandonment of emancipatory politics by those regimes. Communist Parties (in the West, etc.), already entertaining a form of bureaucratic socialism, gradually broke their links with the large mass of workers.

Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa

In Africa, even during the struggles for national independence, politics, with maybe a few exceptions, has been essentially referred to the state principle, i.e., that politics is the state and the state is politics. Not to a position of antagonism with the colonial state order — an organized form of consciousness — but referred to the replacement of colonialists inside the colonial state, i.e. to the occupation of the state posts. Political consciousness and state consciousness tended to be identical; the state tended, then, to be internalized even by those fighting or resisting it. This facilitated the emergence of “territorial nationalism” as the foundation of post-colonial politics. Colonial history has something to do with the prevalence of this conception. The colonial state was a variant form of the state that Sheikh Anta Diop¹⁰ called the “state by conquest”. It is a state in which a conquering group refused to mix with the conquered ones and built its domination on that absolute separation. When the opposition was essentially ethnic, this eventually led to genocide. Most modern states fall into this category: states in North, Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand as well as South Africa. Here, the state does not correspond to a nation; a minority of the victorious conquerors imposes its law on the conquered, defeated majority through coercive state institutions conceived and built for that purpose.

Without going into details, the colonial state, in Africa, did not succeed in a complete genocide of the conquered, colonized people partly due to historical circumstances and the fact that the resources needed to construct the state itself had to be generated by those very peoples. Colonies had to be self-reliant — this became the basis of their justification in the metropoles where the working-class movement was still strong. The first phase of the colonial state was based on brute force and its personnel was essentially composed of military forces, adventurers and psychopaths.¹¹ King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, under the Red Rubber law of brute force, was a typical case. The second phase of the institutionalization of the colonial state was based on the systematic management of native labor as the basis of generation of state revenue. Various forms of forced labor — from coercive (correctional labor, compulsory labor, compulsory crop growing) to non-coercive ones (contracted labor, voluntary labor) — were organized. The Portuguese Labor Code for Natives was the most elaborate.¹² Specified forms of native collaboration (“indirect rule”) were necessary to make this domination workable and bearable. Basically as an outcome of the consequences of the Second World War and the emerging social stratification, the decolonization phase of the colonial state introduced institutions — partially won through struggles by the colonized masses of people — allowing certain basic rights to colonized people. Although very important, this was a transformation within the colonial state and not the latter’s destruction per se.

Parties or political platforms eventually organizing the movement for national independence were ultimately allowed. But, initially at least, these were based on colonial state organizations competing for the occupation of colonial state positions. In this preparation for neocolonialism, only those political formations which treated the central matter of politics in the colonies — the colonial question — sapping thereby that preparation, were suppressed by the colonial state. Radicalization of the permitted parties or movements also took place, however, in the main, national independence was entrusted into hands favourable to neocolonialism. This came, of course, after serious struggles through which the mass movement aimed at radicalizing some of the parties was ultimately defeated. From a political point of view, even to those who militated for emancipatory politics — complete abolition of colonial conditions of life — the occupation of the colonial state rather than the destruction of the colonial state itself was seen as the condition for the realization of such a politics. That is, the occupation of the machinery of the enemy, rather than its destruction and the deployment of a different machinery, was seen as the content of politics. The colonial state’s limited adoption of the parliamentarian mode of politics in the decolonization phase, under the banner of modernization-cum-development (based on the problematic of transfer of models and technology, etc.), determined the political vision of the national independence movement. The analysis of African politics in terms of historical modes of politics remains to be done. This is necessary in order to make it possible to differentiate the African creative political modernity, among other things, from the mere adoption, by Africans, of a political model or formula — modernization. Ultimately, national independence was won on the basis of the abandonment of emancipatory politics rooted in the large masses of the people and their needs and aspirations. The constitutional frameworks taken from the colonialists, to be part of the machinery of government, were almost universally never submitted, through referendum, for approval by the large masses of people.

It is interesting to note that departing colonialists whose colonial state was the very opposite of a parliamentarian mode of politics, were the ones pushing for the variant of that mode through the constitutional frameworks they elaborated for the new independent countries. The coercive institutions created by the colonialists and the political identities and mentalities corresponding to them were not apparently taken into account. The civilization mission became the developing mission whose process was conceptualized as that of transforming, from above, a colonially carved territory into a nation-state. Did the colonialists know it would not work? In any case, former colonialists and former colonized people became “partners in development”. And the former colonial state — now in modernizers’ hands — became the agency par excellence of such development.

At independence a variant of a parliamentarian mode of politics existed. The resulting state parties system was not far from the colonial state in its decolonization phase. Leaders of the newly independent countries, whose occupation of colonial state positions was viewed as the objective and the realization of conditions of an emancipatory politics of self-determination, adopted the colonial state treatment of matters of politics: treatment of differences among the people — democracy, the national question or tribalism, the factory as site of politics, etc. Very quickly, their policies led to the same massacres as those of the colonial period: workers’ strikes were being suppressed by firing, secessions and secessionist tendencies, cries of the national question were dealt with militarily, cultural unevenness was handled through imposed assimilationism, etc.

It would appear, for example, that the internal factor responsible for the so-called “Congo crisis” was the absence of (due to the collapse or the end of) a progressive independent mode of politics, correctly treating the development of processes as matters of politics, shortly after the proclamation of independence. Existing parties were often confusing politics with ideology; in fact, in the absence of politics, ideology became politics and having a revolutionary sounding ideology was seen to be enough to make the state serve and be accountable to the people. Holders of a “revolutionary ideology” were supposed, once in power, to move the state to the left to make it attentive to the needs and aspirations of the masses. In the main, parties condoned the state treatment, essentially colonialist, of post-colonial workers’ strikes, secessions, army mutinies, tribalism, etc. and this fact deepened the crisis.

Even the “national movements”, whose ideology was radical, tended to refer their view point on national independence to external factors (occupation of colonial state positions, external aid to resist against imperialism, adoption of already made models — making it difficult to grasp “national historicity” and to identify and treat problems correctly as matters of politics). This tended to consolidate the colonial state logic, i.e. territorial nationalism. In my humble opinion, important elements of Lumumba’s political programme — the necessity of the unity of the country along the lines and logic of the colonial state and the necessity for one national Party (viewed as the nation organized as one family) — have been implemented by Mobutu. Lumumbist attempts at overthrowing Mobutu’s regime, though a variant of the same politics, thus seem illogical and ineffective.

Despite intense anti-imperialist struggle — centered around those against apartheid, Portuguese and settlerist colonialism — and under the pretext of the post-colonial project of developmentalist nation-building, very much rooted in the colonial legacy (the generation of surplus to ship abroad, by starving masses of people), progressive and emancipated politics was gradually abandoned. Add to this the impact of the Cold War which, starting with the Congo crisis, made Africa another terrain of conflicts between East and West in struggles for world hegemony. Under the pretext of containing the spread of communism to Africa, the West supported militarily the most authoritarian dictatorships. Even the neo-colonial variant of the state-parties (shorthand for the parliamentarian mode), left by departing colonialists, was with few exceptions, on and off, seen as an obstacle to “rapid development” and “national unity” and was ultimately abandoned. Mobutu’s regime, for example, forged in the very process of dismantling the mass armed insurrection for the “Second Independence”¹³, and solidly supported by the US-led West, became increasingly authoritarian and repressive. France continued intervening militarily in internal conflicts leading to the consolidation of tyrannical regimes in some countries of Francophone Africa. Ultimately, the party-state absolutism became the dominant form of rule in Africa.

As far as theories and practices of state power and the organization of the economy are concerned, despite the fact that African countries were colonized and decolonized by Western powers, it is the Soviet (bureaucratic socialist) regimes which seem to have served these countries as models.¹⁴ One party or one party-state, a bureaucratic and patrimonial management of the economy, the seizure and control of the state and its foreign policy by a gang of people speaking in the name of the common interest (“national unity”, “national development”), the scope of the repressive apparatuses (leading to cases of political assassinations, persecution of opponents, etc.), legal arbitrariness, censorship of mass media and cultural, intellectual and spiritual productions, etc., are elements which became common to almost all African post-colonial regimes. Society increasingly became statized: society is forced to service the state which is controlled by an authoritarian gang of people. This is true not only for the once self-styled Marxist-Leninist regimes of Ethiopia, Benin, Angola, Mozambique, Congo-Brazzaville or the so-called popular regimes of Burkina Faso and Ghana, but even for those which are closely linked to Western capitalist powers: the authoritarian bureaucracies of Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Togo, Gabon, Zaire, Kenya, etc. The distinction between regimes of Marxist orientation and regimes of capitalist orientation or between civilian regimes and military ones has been unduly exaggerated. These regimes of African authoritarian bureaucratic centralism have increasingly led to the general feeling of the impossibility and absence of politics.

Various attempts at developing opposition politics to transform those state-party centered authoritarian regimes have often ended with failures. In some cases, armed struggles had to be attempted to overthrow developmentalist states without much success either. When successful, the newly established regimes were not so far away from the ones overthrown. With the deepening of the economic crisis, the situation has somewhat worsened. The party state (or the one dominant party-state) systems, subordinated to the International Monetary Fund/World Bank control, have become increasingly corrupt and terrorist with regard to their own people.

Naturally, the very handling of the economic crisis itself has not been made a process of politics, but, instead, it has been completely referred to the logic of state imposition, in conformity with the IMF/WB restrictions, outside of mass participation, i.e. outside of, or in the absence of, a progressive, emancipatory politics. The “freezing” of workers’ economic rights and the abandonment of a “State social welfare” policy have been retained as the conditions of the so-called “economic recovery”. Recently, in Uganda — a variant of the state-parties system — party activities have been suspended to deal with the economic crisis.

Besides economic crisis, African countries are undergoing social, ideological and political crises. The absence of a democratic politics inside the people themselves — a consequence of the statization of society — has made people become unable to restrain the state in its exclusivist or symmetrized treatment of difference (whether of nationality, gender, intellectual/manual labor, levels of education, etc.). In the face of the maltreatment of refugees, women and national minorities, for example, people have been made to watch this passively. Political refugees seeking asylum have been forcibly returned to their own state’s butchers. Societies have been plunged increasingly into a social crisis. Society has become divided into two: those with guaranteed interest — no matter how insignificant — and those without any interest or even rights. Any state treatment of differences (citizen/non-citizen, male/female, etc.) has been made socially acceptable and inequality has become accepted as a natural element: the right of the fittest. Even accountability has been redefined as a technical matter, as performance rather than a democratic issue. The idea of an Africa of peoples which arose in the late 1950s — leading to the all African peoples’ conferences — has become impossible and absent in peoples’ forms of consciousness. The state has no difficulty in opposing one group (refugees or university students for example) against society.

As a consequence of the state management of the working class, through the one state “trade-union”, and of state terrorism against “non-authorized” workers’ strikes, there is an absence of factory workers’ resistance serving as the leading core of popular resistance in the political processes involving or concerning the entire population in their deviation, or autonomy, from the state. This has been aggravating the state division of the people, reinforcing the state forms of mediation within the population, and thus complicating the process of unification of the people. The struggle against imperialist domination, especially in its IMF/WB form, has become difficult to sustain. The statization of the youth through state party organs has also blocked, in many African countries, student militance, and its social and ethical criticism of society. This has gone hand in hand with the often repeated closing of universities or schools. All these elements of the social crisis are important factors for politics but are not matters of politics per se. In themselves, they do not even generate a political capacity.

Confronted with situations of economic and social crisis, given their hostility to new and different ideas, the ruling forces have become unable to propose a coherent system of values, from so-called Authenticity to various African or other socialisms. Alienation from the masses, and disguised (or not) reliance on imperialism have been the rule. For example, Zaire’s contract with the German OTRAG; Mozambique’s Nkomati Accord; the acceptance of nuclear waste disposal on the continent, and the official smuggling out of national resources by state officials, have marked the ideological and cultural bankruptcy of the ruling forces. Cynicism, with the withering away of the credibility of “official ideologies”, has arisen. Religious fundamentalism or syncretism have also been on the rise. Developmentalism, as an ideology arising from the imperialist propounded doctrines of development, given the state’s incapacity to provide even for mere survival, has failed to be the answer to the ideological crisis. The same process leading to underdevelopment cannot at the same time general development or provide for it.

In Africa, the political crisis, made more obvious by the collapse of socialist states in Eastern Europe, is also specific. The credibility of the party on which the party-state authoritarian system arose has been exposed and put into question. Here too the party-state system has been functioning on the basis of what East Germans have called state paternalism¹⁵ or what Algerians call state populism.¹⁶ The practices of state security (kidnapping, harassment, violation of privacy, etc.) have contradicted that populism. Certain state-party decisions, such as the adoption of IMF/WB proposals and programmes, for example, have brought to the fore the fact that the political ideology governing the party-state has an arbitrary character, i.e. it is a system of lies. The open state repression unleashed against mass movements (of striking workers, students, lecturers, etc.) whose demands are socially legitimate (the state to guarantee regular payment of teachers’ wages, the necessity of a living salary for producers to produce or just to live, academic freedom, etc.); the functioning of the so-called party mass mobilization, as the process of subordinating the people under state control and terrorism (intimidating the people, forcing them to service the state rather than the state servicing the people); the imposition of many types of taxes without the people having anything substantive to show as gains from those taxes; as well as the continuously rising foreign debt: all these aggravate the crisis of the credibility of the party-state system. People want and support efforts to improve the economy; it is, however, clear to them that the whole process is just geared towards the enrichment of the few on the back of the many — while the latter are required to remain silent and docile. The political ideology governing the party is increasingly manifested as mere opportunism with the most unproductive and idle so-called high cadres being the most highly paid! All the talk about austerity measures, in the face of this, is thus unconvincing; opportunism shows through.

On issues requiring people’s solidarity with other peoples in the world (China, Romania, South Africa, Lithuania, etc.) the party vacillates. The party-state itself creates imaginary threats as occasions and pretexts to reinforce itself and to justify state terrorism. The party has been viewed as the site of politics and the source of political truth; the people, on the other hand, have been viewed as being politically immature in performance. It is not clear when and how they may become mature. Is not this fundamentally a trait of the colonial legacy as well? People are seen as incapable of correct and responsible thought; there is no positive need for the party to find out what the people are actually thinking, especially on what society should be like. The people, of course, are required to think as the party tells them! Refusing the people the right to think, the party relates to the people in the same way as state security. The autonomization of the processes of people relating to themselves (democracy), is perceived by the party-state system as a security threat. In Zaire even the Cardinal was expected, even theologically, to think what the Parti-Etat (MRP) thought and said (i.e. Mobutism). And when the party-state system admitted publicly to be corrupt, the process of redressing the situation, the so-called “struggle or war against corruption” organized by the system itself was again referred to the same corrupting process outside of a politics which relies on the masses of people!

It was under these circumstances, as briefly described, that the events in Eastern Europe boosted the on-going people’s struggles against state-party absolutism and authoritarianism and made them embrace the wind of democracy blowing through the world. Movements for democracy, demanding that gangs of those controlling the party-state system (in the name of common interest or fatherly paternalism) resign, came to the fore on the continent. Demands for multi-partyism have, in this regard, often been voiced. It is hoped that multi-partyism will make it possible to wipe out the party-state absolutism. While attempts at organizing internal reforms of the corrupt systems are going on (Gabon, Zaire, Benin, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, etc.) no party-state system has, so far, collapsed. Calls for the organization of democratic national conferences, bringing together all the existing political tendencies, freely to discuss the future of the countries, have also been made. However, no comprehensive assessment has been made of the past failures of the experiences of the parliamentarian mode of politics. How and why did party-state absolutism emerge? Can multi-partyism bring about emancipatory politics in Africa? Why did it fail to do so before?

In Africa too, emancipatory or progressive politics will only come about under certain conditions. The challenge is to specify these conditions and determine the process and operation of their realization, so that it can be clearly seen whether or not multi-partyism is one of the conditions, or the only condition.

The Collapse of “Real Socialism” — What Next?

Socialist politics has been the main source of inspiration in the African struggles for social and people’s emancipation. The crisis of “bureaucratic socialism” in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, and the collapse of people’s democracies in Eastern Europe seem to have dried up that source. Solutions to that crisis may open up a new source of inspiration in the search for a solution in Africa. A brief examination of the crisis of “bureaucratic socialism” is thus in order.

Bureaucratic socialism, a variant of socialism-from-above, emerged from dominance in post revolutionary states (USSR, China, etc.) and post-1945 Eastern European countries on the basis of the abandonment of progressive and emancipatory politics¹⁷ upholding the interest of the large masses of the working people — workers and poor peasants. It was incarnated by a rising group of “bureaucratic intelligentsia” (described by Mao Zedong as a “bourgeoisie of a new type”) and refers to a system of “socialist states” which became corrupt and terrorist in relation to their own people. These states are based on two fundamental functioning characteristics: the existence of a state-party where the party fused with the state and the statization of the means of production, especially the factories.

Two types of bureaucratic socialism can be distinguished (with social democracy, three types of socialism-from-above can be distinguished).¹⁸ In countries such as the USSR, China and Vietnam it rose to dominance after a real internal revolutionary process. In Eastern Europe, however, with the exception of Albania and Yugoslavia, socialism was essentially imposed at the end of the Second World War under the supervision of the Soviet military occupation. There existed, of course, internal forces supporting it. In a real sense, these so-called people’s democracies, whose economies were forced to be dependent on that of the USSR¹⁹, were specific types of “neo-colonies” in the context of the bipolar world.

According to Lenin, in State and Revolution, socialism could be defined as a dialectic opposing proletarian dictatorship exercised through a party-state system, to independent mass movements. The evolution of this system depended on how this contradiction was treated.²⁰ Continuing suppression of these mass movements led to the development of bureaucratic socialism. In Eastern European countries particularly, the “neo-colonial” constraint of Soviet domination had a bearing on the way those movements had to be suppressed. That is why, for example, the Soviet regime’s refusal to intervene, under perestroika and glasnost, had a catalytic impact on the collapse of the party-state system in the Soviet Union.

The rise of centralist bureaucratic socialism to prominence, despite reformist and cultural revolutionary mass movements against it, brought to the fore the completion of the “crisis of Marxism”. Basic references to Marxism as a victorious revolutionary politics were eroded. Not only did socialist states become corrupt and terrorist vis-a-vis their own working people; the working class, misled by increasingly revisionist communist parties became unable to come up with a revolutionary political project and capacity; and radical national liberation movements gave rise to regimes which became unable to carry out, beyond national independence, any social emancipation — gradually they became authoritarian, corrupt and terrorist as well.

Struggles against tendencies towards bureaucratic socialism (often described as “modern revisionism”) in revolutionary movements, world-wide, go very far back. From struggles around workers’ control culminating in the crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion²¹, and anti-revolutionary cultural mass movements (the great Proletarian Revolution in China, the French May-June 1968, the Black Liberation Movement in the USA, the Black consciousness movement in South Africa, etc.) up to the 1989 mass uprisings in Eastern Europe and the Tiananmen insurrection, the targets attacked have been similar centralist bureaucratic socialist tendencies, despotism, privileges and corruption in socialist States, revisionism, “social-fascism”, or racism in communist parties and trade-unions, for example.²² The resignation of some African intellectuals (G. Padmore, A. Cesaire, etc.) from communist parties or the exodus of southern Sudanese Marxists from the Communist Party of Sudan, etc. point to similar targets. Without going into details, what has been often aimed at in these struggles is a conception of politics which is open, democratic, pluralist in its processes and relying on the large masses of people.²³ Failure to achieve this objective led to the consolidation of bureaucratic socialism. At the same time, the failure of socialist states particularly to completely suppress the struggles of the masses of workers, peasants, and intellectuals, against it, has led to its economic, social, political and ideological crisis, and its collapse in Eastern Europe.²⁴

What solutions have been proposed to handle this crisis? In the USSR and China, attempts have been made, and continue to be made, at reforming this crisis of bureaucratic socialism, from within the state-party system. Policies of “struggle against corruption” — made from within the corrupt system and implemented by the same corrupt system, mechanisms aimed at easing the functioning of state regulations, and introducing partially free elections, the introduction of sectors of market economy, etc. have been put into practice. These reforms have given rise to considerable troubles within their respective social and national formations. In the USSR, especially, due to the past centralist way of treating the national question, nationalism has arisen. In the main, reforms have not so far resolved the general crisis.²⁵ The defeat of the Tiananmen insurrection, despite international pressures, has temporarily consolidated the very corrupt system in China without having completely resolved its general crisis. The Centralist tendencies seem to have been reinforced. In Eastern Europe, the state-party system has collapsed and people have been tempted to agitate for the state-parties system (multi-partyism) and/or for political organizations other than parties (eg. forums) viewed as operators of an open, democratic, pluralist and people based politics.

In the context of the bipolar world, the crisis and collapse of one side gives the impression of the victory and superiority of the other. The political death of bureaucratic socialism has propelled the politics of parliamentarianism to a hegemonic position. Celebrants of capitalism in the West, especially, have seized the occasion to intensify the propaganda for a free market economy and multi-party democracy. Self-styled Marxist-Leninist regimes and parties have very quickly dropped any reference to Marxism — not necessarily as required by any local mass movement per se, but to go with the world current.

To restrict or destroy the state-party monopoly of political truth, state paternalism or populism (“these factories belong to workers, strikes are unjustified”), three theses have arisen. The first thesis is that of internal reforms à la Gorbachev and à la Chinoise. It is essentially a centrist reformist line claiming to transform the existing state-party system (from “bureaucratic socialism” to “constitutional or liberal socialism”)²⁶ while at the same time concentrating power around the presidency, rejecting the law of grand capital, while excluding any suggestions of making major factories the sites of political processes. Whereas some sectors are open to the laws of the market, strikes are forbidden in the so-called strategical state factories. This is a very unstable political line. Failing to be rooted on new progressive political orientations upholding workers’ interests, it has unleashed, without being able to control them, troubles related to the national question in the former USSR itself (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Lithuania, etc.) as well as outside it, leading to the re-emergence of classical German nationalism in Central Europe, racist tensions in Bulgaria, nationality tensions in Romania, growing anti-Semitic expressions etc. Clearly, economic sanctions, to resolve some of those troubles, do not constitute a category of emancipatory politics. Decentralization from above may not solve democratically the national question.

China has not gone as far as the former USSR. Its handling of the Tiananmen Insurrection, through armed aggression, seems to have definitely killed whatever remained of a “people-based” character of the state-party system: the people’s army seems to have been transformed into a simple repressive force. The troubles are not over yet. Nevertheless, the fact that part of the army refused to fire on the students was still remarkable.²⁷

The second thesis has been to consolidate civil society politically while at the same time make all the political organizations and reform parties (Stalinian ones having been discarded) participate in the competition for State posts. This has led more or less, to a state-parties (multi-party) system with a consolidated civil society (exercising a right of recall), a de-statized civil society trying to restrain the state (making sure that notoriously known corrupt people be ejected from state positions). This line is also unstable as it is effective only if accountability is a permanent process, i.e. if the civil society has a permanent right of recall at any moment. The government may be made unable to manage the country’s affairs and “market forces” may become paramount.

The third thesis, illustrated at one time by Poland, has been to consolidate politically through autonomous political organizations other than vanguard parties, gravitating around the workers and factories. Society is supposed to develop, under working-class leadership (through forms of consciousness) a clear distinction between society and the state. Political organizations here refrain from contesting for state positions or seizing state power. Instead of society serving the state, the empowered society should make the state serve it. Here multi-partyism is not viewed as a key element, even if it is present. Politics is defined through a multiplicity of sites of politics (the factory as a site of politics; religion or culture as matters of politics; communities; schools; the peasantry, etc.) relying on the societal leadership of the working-class masses, independently organized through factories and communities. The treatment of matters of politics through those sites — and led by militants — was supposed to consolidate the unity of society forcing the state to be accountable to the whole people. This conception is far away from the Leninist thesis of the poly-functionality of the state-party, of leading the state and also leading, against the state, independent working-class mass movements. The recent evolution of Poland seems to show that this thesis is also unstable — Poland seems to have relapsed into multi-party democracy and the market economy.

Very briefly, against the state-party absolutism in society and economy — Eastern European, Soviet, and Chinese — mass movements have put forth democracy without vanguard parties (separation of parties from the state), and the market economy with the view to catch up with the Western level of development (especially consumption). In Eastern Europe especially, the question of the relationship between politics and economy emerged as that between democracy and development. But an unregulated market economy and liberal democracy, judged by the rising mass disillusionment, has not resolved the issue.

Celebrants of the victory of democracy, in the West, are noticing that their own countries are still undergoing crisis and that even the so-called just cause of imposing democracy abroad is not bringing solutions to the economic, social, political and ideological crisis in those countries. The Gulf War has underlined the imperialist character of Western democracies. The politics of democracy and market economy required by the emerging “new international order” may not uphold the basic interests of the large masses of the working people in the world. We are headed towards a prolonged world political crisis. Neither the state, the party, nor the market seem to be operators of a politics of social emancipation — this is the challenge.

An Emancipatory Mode of Politics

Progressive politics does not always exist; when it exists, it does so under conditions whose realization gives rise to a concrete mode of politics. What are the conditions in Africa, for emancipatory politics to exist? Specification of these conditions is necessary for a determination of a corresponding mode of politics. Instead of just comparing the merits and demerits of multi-partyism against those of the existing single party-state absolutism, the best approach is to specify those conditions.

In Africa, we must move away from the unpatriotic “territorial nationalism”²⁸ of compradore modernizers, a process of “nation-building-from-above”, rooted in a colonial legacy and insisting on political unanimity (“national unity”). This process has blocked people’s creativity and mass enthusiasm and complicated the treatment of differences among the people by the people themselves. We must move away from developmentalism which is based on a mere transfer of economic, cultural, political and social models arrived at through an outside controlled process of decision-making. We must de-construct the colonial legacy and the fixity of traditions (traditions invented or imagined by colonialists and claimed to be African and adopted as such by Africans); these “traditions” are used to justify, embellish and make bearable, the post-colonial state which we have to de-imperialize. Thus, we must move away from the process of “de-indigenizations” of “traditional society” and “indigenization” of the colonial state. Our economies have continued to be “denationalized”²⁹ i.e. privatized by international capital, keeping them away from the possible control by the African people through their “democratic state” yet to be constructed. We must have control over our integration into the world economy. We must democratize the knowledge process now completely dominated by the outside. Without a new historical mode of politics, a new vision of politics, which would demarginalize the large masses of people (women, youth, workers, poor peasants, people-without-identity, the invisible majority), de-freezing their creativity and allowing them to move themselves to the centre stage of history-making in our countries, we cannot succeed.

Politics (political capacity, political consciousness), the active prescriptive relationship to reality, exists under the condition of people who believe that politics must exist. Marx and Engels assigned to proletarians the modern revolutionary capacity of realizing communism; this has not been fulfilled. Lenin thought that there was no revolutionary capacity other than political capacity. Proletarians may have this capacity under the conditions that they satisfy the requirements and conditions of that politics. They must take a position on politics i.e. take a position on the factory, on the question of the state and power, on the question of war and national liberation. That is, they must have political consciousness; a merely spontaneous class instinct (trade-unionist consciousness) would not do. Fanon assigned that capacity to the rebelling peasants; Cabral assigned it to intellectuals who have committed class suicide. Generally, in Africa, the tendency has been to assign it to the state (including the party and liberation movements functioning really as state structures) per se. Unfortunately, the state cannot transform or redress itself: it kills this prescriptive relationship to reality by imposing consensual unanimity. Internalization, by people, of the state, and state orientation in handling, for example, differences among the people, provokes self-censorship in people and arrests political consciousness.

Politics has militants and sites.³⁰ Sites are constituted by the development of the treatment of matters of politics. The factory is a site of politics, the assembly in the ancient Greek democracy, the Convention in the French Revolution, the Palaver³¹ (where the collective open mutual self-questioning and self-criticism takes place as a way of treating differences among the people), the Mbongi³² (lineage assembly), and perhaps now the national conference (when it is independent of the state) in Africa are sites of politics. Without those sites, politics ceases. Both the state-parties and the party-state systems refused to see the factory as being more than a simple place for production of commodities. Both systems think of the people, as a whole, as simply a guarantee for the state.

Politics is not in the party, because it does not always exist even when parties do. The party is often incorrectly viewed as a timeless instrument or organ of modern politics. In Africa, it is just adopted as a simple tool, formula or technology; its historicity is never problematized. In its present form, the party emerged after the failure of the Paris Commune (1871) and the rise of imperialist states.³³ It would take too long to discuss here the transformations, the crisis and the collapse of the party and the party form. The fact is today that every party incarnates a state project. Parties have increasingly ceased to be political organizations whether they be in power or in the opposition; they propose to us the state, the government as the exclusive reference for consciousness. Parties in opposition, instead of treating matters of politics, work to ultimately replace the one in power. The thrust of progressive politics is to be separated from the state. It is not possible to achieve a democratic state, i.e. a state that is transparent to, rather than destructive of, people’s viewpoints, if people only “think” state, internalize state and thus self-censor themselves.

Politics exists through historical modes, whether the revolutionary mode of Saint-Just and Robespierre, the Bolshevik mode of Lenin, the Stalinist mode of communist parties, or the parliamentarian mode of the consensus over the supremacy of the law of commodity. In Africa, we must work and militate for a new mode of politics.

In Africa too, emancipatory politics will be a politics without parties but through political organizations. The difficulty we are facing is that the categories we use (mass organization, civil society, movements, etc.) are party related categories. Our starting point must be: in Africa too, people think and this is the sole material basis of politics. We must investigate the internal content of what they actually think. It is through an analysis of these forms of consciousness that we will grasp the forms of political consciousness characterizing the antagonism with the existing overall socio-political order. It is only a political organization — necessitated by political (as opposed to state) treatment of matters of politics — which can understand that there are at least two situations in contemporary societies: the factory (including the plantation and home) as a site of politics, and secondly the processes involving the whole people in the latter’s deviations from the state. These are processes of political judgement, in which a deviation takes place from the consensual unanimity entertained by the state routine. This leads to the realization that progressive politics has several sites and a multiplicity of processes: localized processes like in the factory, and open (to all) processes involving all categories of people without privileging anyone of them. An open process is an extended Mbongi, a certain type of assembly in which a Palaver — animated by militants — takes place.

Emancipatory politics, in Africa, will not exist just because parties exist. It is because the party-state has collapsed and is politically and perhaps historically dead — even if it lingers on in some places — that the state-parties system is knocking at our door. Multi-partyism, replacing the single party-state, would not enhance the emergence of political consciousness; that is why even imperialism is agitating for the exportation of multi-partyism (making it an extra aid conditionality). This is reflected in the contradictory character of the African movement for democracy: the national conference is much more of a site of politics than the parties. Will these parties jeopardize the success of such conferences?

Multiplicity of sites of politics calls for a pluralist structure. We need a workers’ committee (workers’ cell, leading core) in the factory/plantation and not a trade union (specified by a link to a party in a Stalinian mode, or to a state under the state-parties system) leading the process to the abolition of the factory as a system of exploitation and despotism. But also the existence of such a committee highlights the fact that workers as a group are capable of making politics. We need popular committees (assemblies?), for everybody without anyone group being privileged, for other processes of politics: people’s treatment of the differences within the people-democracy, people’s treatment of many great differences (intellectual/manual labor, male/female, city/countryside, industry/ agriculture, etc.), people’s treatment of the question of national identity (historicity of the national question, multi-ethnic identity, cultural/linguistic decentralization, etc.), and people’s treatment of the question of imperialist domination, etc. Together various militants of these political forms of political organization will serve as secretariats in charge of the political intellectuality of this mode of politics. Let me say, in passing, that a militant is not a representative of any group; that is why the basic method of work of the militant is to take a public statement for investigation and debate at various sites of politics.

It is through a scheme like the one briefly suggested above, that peoples’ viewpoints on matters of politics, as opposed to that of the state and parties, will be kept alive, and that the state can be contained, made accountable and democratized. Regulations aimed at silencing people’s political viewpoints must be made the first target for a politics of democracy and social emancipation to develop. If multi-partyism can achieve the eradication of those regulations then, as a transition to a new mode of politics, struggles for multi-partyism may be tactically supported.

I have tried to show that dominant historical modes of politics, now in crisis, cannot resolve the world-wide political crisis we are facing. For a long time, since perhaps the Atlantic slave trade, African peoples have barely been responsible for their own self-emancipation; they, instead, have been the subject of “Western Charity” (abolitionists, missionaries, colonialist civilizers, neo-colonialist partners in African “development”, etc.). Short of a new mode of politics, capable of making the large masses of people responsible independently of the state (repressive or paternalist /populist) problematic, we are headed, as elsewhere, towards prolonged crisis. This consciousness emerges and develops through the active participation in the development and treatment of processes of matters political. When this participation is stopped, the consciousness is replaced by the internationalization of the state perspective and the ensuing self-censorship. The party, in its present form, cannot enhance this development nor can a multi-partyism which reduces politics to a matter of numbers. In this process of regaining a sense of responsibility for themselves, the large masses of people can be reactivated and extended, through those traditions of the Palaver and the fire-place assembly (Mbongi and Baraza) that were attacked, denigrated and destroyed by both colonialist and post-colonialist states.

These are just preliminary reflections to serve — hopefully as a basis of discussion and research — on questions of vital interest to our African countries.