Communist revolution in africa?

[Red_sickle]

Africa i know is a continent but its thriving a revolution surely ?
The goverment are corrupt there and people die from lack of clean water , it needs help ,
It could be done , just start at a village and build schools,houses, hospitals and talk to them about communsim surely they have the passion to make there area a better place ? And then it would be get bigger more surport and finaly a goverment take over ?

Good idea or not ?

[Tim Cornelis]

just start at a village and build schools,houses, hospitals and talk to them about communsim surely they have the passion to make there area a better place ?

This is really naive, such missionary works will seldom be fruitful. Many will perceive it as a wealthy suburban kid patronising them by telling them how to improve their own lives. Also, the number of people you can reach by that will be severely limited. Additionally, many poor Africans are too busy surviving than to concern themselves with a risky venture such as communist revolution.

The nominally Marxist-Leninist revolutions in Angola, Mozambique, Ethopia, and so forth have scarred the name of communism in Africa like Stalin did in Europe. You don't simply erase that history.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Any communist revolution anywhere is good.
However I don't think building schools and hospitals will bring a revolution earlier. I guess people should be informed about communism and after a revolution the hospitals and such will come.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Additionally, many poor Africans are too busy surviving than to concern themselves with a risky venture such as communist revolution.


This could also be a reason why they would concern themselves with a revolution because they have nothing to lose.

[pluckedflowers]

A good idea would probably be to not think of a continent three times the size of Europe as a single bloc about which we can make statements regarding its readiness for revolution.

[Red_sickle]

So bad idea then ? :(

[KrimsonV]

I feel that spreading the idea of communism equally, or almost equally across the whole Africa is an impossible task as of today. The continent is split into extremely different regions, each one has its own conflicts and its own reality. The lack of proper means of communication and transport would actually make it not possible to simply get in contact with the majority of the popoulation.

The local governments and the people themselves would also reject the idea of any kind of unification, as many internal struggles are actually caused by the need of individual groups to "separate" itself from the rest. The many dictatorships would probably go as far as preventing any form of education effort to keep its people ignorant as well. On top of that, most western countries would actively oppose such a revolution, as the current model of Africa is *very* dear to them.

One can dream, but even with my very limited knowledge I can see that this is just not going to happen any time soon. Sadly.

[pluckedflowers]

So bad idea then ? :(

I'm just saying, first of all, that we can't talk about Africa as if it was a single country. There are vast differences between countries like Morocco, DRC, South Africa, and Somalia, just to name a few. Beyond that, your proposal also makes it sound like African peoples need outside help to "introduce" them to the idea of communism. But, as Marx and Engels noted, "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

[Mass Grave Aesthetics]

There are plenty of communist parties and orgs in many African countries. Some have a proper working class base. People in African countries don´t need political education from the west. They have experience and theory.

[The Idler]

This reminds me of a thread a while back where a user proposed launching an armed uprising in the Third World. I guess gap years aren't what they used to be.

[Rafiq]

Populist Socialism is quite popular in Africa.

[Yugo45]

From "my" experience, communist revolutions that start in undeveloped parts of the world tend not to work out.

but idk

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Stay home, abandon this absurd hope of starting revolution in a place you have never been to.I don't like being mean but it's the truth. Africa can handle its own revolution.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Africa is probably as far from Socialism as anywhere. I am talking about Socialism in the Marxist, materialist sense btw, not some strongman coming to power under the banner of the red flag and 'anti-imperialism/national liberation'.

The reason being that, due to the debt crisis of the 1980s and 90s, in addition to the civil wars that have raged over the continent the past 40 years (over 130 wars since 1970), Africa in general (in particular sub-saharan Africa and the former colonised countries, of course) lacks both financial, investible capital and human capital. The former due to debt problems and shit structure, corrupt governments etc., and the latter due to shit education, lack of skills and of course natural deaths (malaria etc) and other deaths ie. malnutrition, lack of water, WAR.

I'd say Africa will not even be able to accumulate enough capital to secure a higher stage of economic development until it can trade with developed nations on more favourable terms. Read into that how you wish.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Building networks in many parts of Africa is very difficult, simply because some regions are extremely under-developed. But it's hard to make blanket generalizations about the continent, after all it hosts everything from Capetown to Cairo to Lagos...

[wsg1991]

Populist Socialism is quite popular in Africa.

what do you mean , name examples since i don't know any

[OCMO]

Tim Cornelis, the examples you refer of the Angola and Mozambique experience are more complex than a marxist-leninist revolution. In Angola altough MPLA had formally more power, the nation was divided by two factions wich turned out in a bloddy civil war, so no actual big government actions were even imposed. Mozambique was more stable when the independence was declared, with FRELIMO in power, but why do you say it scarred the name of communism? Looking at it's history, the problems with Mozambique was provoked more by imperialist intervention than internal problems under the banner of communism, actually, Samora Machel still remains a quite popular figure in Mozambique, and the work i've read from him seems pretty decent.

I would like to know why the selections of those countries (i'm pretty ignorant about the Ethiopian regime), since from the two cases i know best, the failures cannot be appointed to communist terror or something similar.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It's an absolute myth that Africa's problems come down to corruption and bad governance. Rather than being root causes, these are effects of, variously: colonialism, slave trade, IMF structural adjustment programs, natural resource endowment, landlocking, poor geography and the ridiculous debt situations of the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Sadly, sub-saharan Africa (let's not be quasi-racist and tarnish all of Africa with the same brush, it's not all horrendously poor) is a perfect storm of institutional, historical and geographical factors which mix to create an almost absolute block on development and growth of the economy, of living standards.

It's pretty sad to see. In my opinion, the west can do no more than provide no-strings attached aid and let Africa develop in a more organic way. Sadly I doubt that will happen.

[Tukhachevsky]

People talking about communism in African surely doesn't know about how many "socialist" parties- socialists, as in chavez category- rule countries there.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

There's also the following issue:

much of North Africa - Morocco, Libya, Egypt, etc., is ruled by despots with huge security apparatus and large welfare services due to oil receipts. Bad governance as this is, it means that people are largely better off than they'd be if their country was run along neo-liberal terms, purely in terms of GDP per capita.

Much of sub-saharan Africa, however, is chaotic, and has barely - if at all - formed Capitalistic relations. Much land is still 'owned' by villages/communities, and much farming is still subsistence farming, i.e. output is consumed by the village that produces it, rather than traded. Subsistence farming is low output, low investment, no technology but LOW RISK, in the face of unceretain weather, fluctuating prices etc. In other words, it's rational for a poor African peasant to opt for subsistence farming, if they are sensitive to the risk of starvation.

Now, Johnny Westerner parachutes into a village, starts talking about communism and about how they should stop working to survive 10-12+ hours a day and start reading Marx, Engels and whoever else Johnny says. He says they should give up their subsistence farming, move to the cities, become the even poorer, even mroe mal-nourished, even more disease-ridden urban working class so that they can then rise up and become 'Socialists'. He's just going to sound like a condescending, utopian, out-of-touch prick, isn't he?

I mean, you can see why this would be utter failure...! :rolleyes:

The west should stop meddling in the affairs of Africa. People talk about bad governance and corruption in Africa, but don't wonder if there's any link between 3 centuries of slave trade, followed by a century of brutal colonial rule in which political, economic and social institutions were set up by the Europeans for the sole purpose of economic extraction of natural resources via forced labour, heavy taxation etc. These institutions persist today, and the 'west' is still trying to meddle in the form of IMF Structural Adjustment Programs and the infamous aid agencies. It's nuts. Unless you're some sort of racist, you have to believe that, left alone, Africa too will developed, like the west has, like the BRIC countries are doing. Just leave them fucking be, otherwise they'll stagnate forever.

I was shocked to learn that per capita income in sub-saharan Africa is lower today than it was in the 1960s. That really is terrible. 50 years later and they've gone, in real terms, backwards! And probably lost a bunch of lives along the way. Even since 1980, there have been 126 wars involving 32 countries. 154 ceasefires, of which only 9 have been followed by 10 years of peace. According to Collier (2008, bit of a knob but still..), in any 5-year period, sub-saharan African countries have a 14% risk of civil war. Where conflict occurs, poverty rates rise to 54%, compared to 22% 'normal' poverty rates for developing countries.

Could go on all day with shocking stats like these. They just show the effect of meddlesome westerners, along with the bad governance, bad luck (geography) that Africa has had over the past 50 years or so.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

A good idea would probably be to not think of a continent three times the size of Europe as a single bloc about which we can make statements regarding its readiness for revolution.

Yes we can. Most parts of sub-saharan Africa are highly underdeveloped. Africa as a whole has 70% of its population working in agriculture. Before Africa has a communist revolution, they need a solid bourgeois revolution to first Create the revolutionary proletarian communist class.

[wsg1991]

There's also the following issue:

much of North Africa - Morocco, Libya, Egypt, etc., is ruled by despots with huge security apparatus and large welfare services due to oil receipts. Bad governance as this is, it means that people are largely better off than they'd be if their country was run along neo-liberal terms, purely in terms of GDP per capita.
.

only Libya and Algeria ( 2 out of 6 countries ) have oil deposits . the others however we have decent welfare services , which was btw the main focus of liberation moverments parties , even though they are not socialists

[MarxSchmarx]

This notion that comrades in Africa don't need much of anything from leftists in the global north (articulated uniformly by those living in wealthy countries) is incorrect.

The truth is, leftists everywhere need each other, and the enduring strength of our movement is that our analysis and convictions are shared passionately by people who are the seeds of change over immense distances - perhaps only Christianity and soccer come close in its scope. We have much to learn from each other, and African leftists can learn much from the experience of western leftists; western leftists, I concede, will probably learn much more from African leftists than vise versa.

Furthermore, the struggle is hardly localized. It is an interlinking of people that requires recognizing the systemic, global nature of the problem. For instance, if a notorious western company is setting up shop in some African country, I can readily imagine westerners who know the shenanigans that company pulls being quite useful to the struggles of communities that are facing that company. And when American port workers refuse to unload cargo from ships flying the Honduran flag, for instance, they are engaging in the kind of "help" that people in the global north can give.

We would be foolish to neglect such north-south transfers of expertise - the error is simply in assuming it is unidirectional.

[Imposter Marxist]

Unfortunatly it seems any attempt at revolution on africa will turn out just like it did in asia and latin america: state capitalist. Libya, Egypt, zimbabwe, mozambique, angola, etc