Communist University: African Socialism Revisited?

[Communist]

received via email---->

_______
_________________
_________________________
___________________________


http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_D4UK2kWf5ik/SoMDW4n6AKI/AAAAAAAABUE/on39Fhsmpok/s400/Nkrumah.jpg (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_D4UK2kWf5ik/SoMDW4n6AKI/AAAAAAAABUE/on39Fhsmpok/s1600-h/Nkrumah.jpg) [CU for Thursday, 13 August 2009]

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” - Communist Manifesto, 1848





The battles of the past years have been fought, Jacob Zuma is President, and everyone is asking the question: So where to?

From the time of Eduard Bernstein and his 1899 book “Evolutionary Socialism (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm)”, and Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 response to Bernstein, “Reform or Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm)”, the same question has been put, in one way or another.

In 1914, in each country, the reformists supported the warmongers. Lenin led the revolutionaries at that point, then led the revolutionaries of Russia in 1917, and then was thede factoleader of the Communist International from 1919 until his death in 1924.

The reformists expropriated the old struggle name of “Social Democrat” and called themselves “Socialists”. Many West European countries elected such anti-communist “Socialists” to run their bourgeois states in the service of “their” bourgeois ruling classes for varying lengths of time.

In the history of the struggle for liberation from colonialism in Africa , the question “Reform or Revolution” was again put. To sound better and to deceive the people more easily, false “Socialism” was dressed up again, but now as “African Socialism”, and was widely used as a smokescreen for neo-colonialism from the dawn of African Independence in the 1950s and 1960s.

Dr Kwame Nkrumah spoke out firmly against this false so-called African Socialism more than forty years ago. See the linked article below. Although Kwame Nkrumah and his adversary Leopold Senghor are both long gone, yet Nkrumah’s words appear to carry as much relevant meaning as they did when they were spoken in Cairo in 1967.

It remains for us now to carry the struggle forward. What kind of “socialism” will we have in South Africa ? Will we have reform, or will we have revolution, or will we have both?


Click on this link:

African Socialism Revisited, Kwame Nkrumah, 1967 (http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/1967,+Nkrumah,+African+Socialism+Revisited) (2587 words)


__________________________________________________
Posted By DomzaNet to Communist University (http://domza.blogspot.com/2009/08/african-socialism-revisited.html) on 8/12/2009 07:59:00 P
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
_______
_________________
_________________________
___________________________

[New Tet]

Although European and American colonialism deserve their rightful places in the pantheon of social evils, Nkrumah is right on the mark here!


"All available evidence from the history of Africa up to the eve of the European colonisation, shows that African society was neither classless nor devoid of a social hierarchy. Feudalism existed in some parts of Africa before colonisation; and feudalism involves a deep and exploitative social stratifi*cation, founded on the ownership of land. It must also be noted that slavery existed in Africa before European coloni*sation, although the earlier European contact gave slavery in Africa some of its most vicious characteristics. The truth remains, however, that before colonisation, which became widespread in Africa only in the nineteenth century, Africans were prepared to sell, often for no more than thirty pieces of silver, fellow tribesmen and even members of the same "extended family" and clan. Colonialism deserves to be blamed for many evils in Africa, but surely it was not preceded by an African Golden Age or paradise. A return to the pre-colonial African society is evidently not worthy of the ingenuity and efforts of our people."