Democracy And Socialism In Africa

Robin Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429722455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After independence many African countries abjured conventional patterns of political representation and democratic participation in the interest of creating a unified state and promoting economic development. Today, however, the dominant models of one-party democracy and African socialism are in terminal collapse as a result of internal pressures a

1
Introduction: Socialism or Democracy, Socialism and Democracy

Robin Cohen

Debates about the relationship between socialism and democracy are as old as the social movements for these practices and the ideas themselves. Although the discussions of socialism and democracy in Africa have a special tone and flavour, the African experience is being increasingly drawn into a global forum. This introduction thus provides a broad historical and comparative analysis before returning to the particularities of the African context in a concluding chapter.

Let me start with a few preliminary comments on what is normally seen as the historically prior movement, namely democracy. Throughout the development of the philosophy and history of democracy, sceptics made clear that as a form of government, or of representation, democracy has not meant, and perhaps can never mean, what its literal Greek translation implied—“government by the people.” In ancient Greece, though the great philosophers Plato and Socrates proclaimed their interest in democratic forms of government, Plato in The Republic thought it impossible to govern without the aid of separate, specialized, and privileged upper strata—for him the soldiers and the guardians. Socrates was perhaps more democratic in his instincts, but in Athens as in other prosperous city-states, he was prepared to accord democratic rights only to all Athenian “citizens”, a category that conveniently excluded women, slaves, and subjected peoples—the vast majority of the ancient Greek population.

Socialist and Communist Critiques of Democracy

By the time socialist movements (as opposed to socialist ideas that had been embryonic earlier) had developed in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the extension of democracy had barely moved beyond the defence of the bourgeoisie from the depredations and overweening privileges of the royalty and the nobility. Of course, the power of the urban masses had already been glimpsed in the jacqueries of the French Revolution and the widespread riots of the year 1848.

But the franchise was extremely limited in most European countries, still ignoring women and also excluding the propertyless, wageless, and ill-educated. Equally, the notion of “rights”, despite the declarations of the revolutionaries, was poorly recognized in political and legal systems. The simple association of democracy with the abolition of feudal privilege on behalf, principally, of the bourgeoisie was probably the origin of the potent (yet, we shall argue, dangerously erroneous) jibe by sections of the left—namely that democracy in most Western capitalist states could be reduced to the pejorative expression “bourgeois democracy.”

It is all too easy to see how socialists might have been suspicious of any extensions of democratic rights. Were these, they argued, simply not grudging concessions, or Machiavellian tidbits, tossed to the masses by conniving regimes that had no real intention of devolving their power or diminishing their privileges? Such derogatory conceptions of Western democracy by those acting in the name of socialism have taken many forms, in the industrialized as well as the nonindustrialized world.

The conventional socialist critique was to look to the origins of representative bodies like parliaments (and to see in them the manifest interests of the emergent bourgeoisie) or to the development of liberal and conservative parties (and to see them only offering cynical and well-timed concessions to the working class). The domination of labour and social democratic parties by opportunist politicians was also depicted as a “betrayal” of the working class. This accusation was not particularly revelatory, for the oligarchic tendencies of such parties were already extensively analysed by early political sociologists like Michels (1959).

For those socialists who were revolutionaries, only the destruction of “the state” or “the system”—catch-all categories covering a wide range of social, legal, and political institutions—would usher in a democratic possibility, and that after a period of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “the withering away of the state”—both rather open-ended projects and conceptions.

The implication of socialist critiques that coupled the words bourgeois and democracy was not only that socialism was in some manner incompatible with democracy, but that it was also in some manner superior to and above democracy. In this view, democracy was no substitute for socialism. Rather its attractiveness was used and manipulated by the bourgeoisie to curtail and sidetrack the masses’ true needs (sometimes it was difficult to find powerful demands) for socialism.

This kind of reasoning suited conspiratorial and exile parties. It was particularly appropriate to communist parties recognized by the Com-intern—which with rare exceptions (France and Italy come to mind) were either forbidden to take part in electoral processes or, where not outlawed, were incapable of commanding popular support. Despite the exaggerated claims of communist parties to be speaking in the name of “the masses” or “the working class” or the “common people”, it is remarkable how few communist regimes were established as a result of the exercise of the popular will. Instead “vanguardism” and “democratic centralism” prevailed on the orthodox left. Lenin (cited in Gray 1963: 481) had advanced this tradition by arguing that communists should work within the framework of “bourgeois” or parliamentary democracy only in order to prepare for the “dispersion of parliament” by soviets.

A good many—too many—socialists with democratic instincts were misled by these self-interested and simplistic concepts. It is time, indeed it is now long overdue, for socialists to say unequivocally that the history of communist regimes since 1917 has demonstrated that “vanguardism” meant “the party first, the masses later” while “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “democratic centralism” meant “secretive and authoritarian rule by the politburo.”

Third World and Student Critiques of Democracy

Around 1960, the year that Africans called “the golden year of independence”, constructing a neutralist and nonaligned path between the great power blocs suddenly appeared an attractive possibility—a “third” way in a “third” worid, with its own identity and its own egalitarian political philosophy, based on its own indigenous roots. Such was the dream. Even Fidel Castro (cited in Paczuska 1986: 130), who in the 1990s is seen as one of the last outposts of orthodox communism, in 1959 placed the Cuban revolution firmly in the nonaligned camp: “Our revolution is neither capitalist nor communist. Capitalism sacrifices the human being, communism with its totalitarian concepts sacrifices human rights. We agree with neither one nor another.”

The nonaligned movement attracted dissenting communist regimes like Yugoslavia, those states emerging from an armed national liberation struggle like Cuba, and the bulk of states that had gone through a peaceful decolonization process. One after the other, Third World leaders weighed in with their particular versions of their novel routes between capitalism and communism. Nehru evolved a notion of “democratic collectivism”, Senghor one of “African socialism.” For Nyerere the objective was “communitarianism”, for Sékou Touré, “communocracy”, for Nasser a “democratic, socialist, cooperative democracy” (Sigmund 1963: 12).

More often than not these “third ways” involved a preference for one-party democracy rather than a two- or multiparty system. Nyerere was probably the most articulate defender of a democratic one-party model. For him, African traditions of democracy were closely attuned to the ancient Greek ideal—which he characterized as “government by discussion among equals” (Nyerere 1963: 197). By contrast, he saw the Anglo-Saxon tradition as a contest between two classes, one defending wealth and the status quo, the other the masses and the desire for change. He further claimed that, as “with rare exceptions” class was “entirely foreign to Africa”, there was no need for two such parties. Nyerere saw the 1960s as a time of national emergency, when all had to unite against colonialism and tribalism and for the rebuilding of the economy, the eradication of disease, and the banishment of ignorance and superstition (Nyerere 1963: passim).

The 1960s “Third Worldist” criticism of capitalist democracy was followed by the more indiscriminate attacks promoted by the student movement of the 1960s. Both critiques shared an even-handed dislike of the two cold war power blocs. Indeed, the revolutionary-minded students in Paris, London, and Berkeley directed their fire at Bolshevism as much as capitalism. According to Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (in Oglesby 1969: 261), who were strongly involved in the “May Events” in France:

it is true to say that Communists, and also Trotskyists, Maoists, and the rest, no less than the capitalist state, all look upon the proletariat as a mass that needs to be directed from above. As a result, democracy degenerates into the ratification at the bottom of decisions taken at the top, and the class struggle is forgotten while leaders jockey for power within the political hierarchy.

Instead of a revolutionary party, a vanguard, or a rearguard, the Cohn-Bendits and their student allies looked to “a host of insurrectional cells, be they ideological groups, study groups [or] street gangs” (Oglesby 1969: 266). For them, the setting up of a party inevitably reduced freedom of the people to freedom to agree with the party. Democracy was not corrupted by bad leadership, but by the very existence of leadership.

As in the student movement, the idea of building democracy from below was very much the guiding principle for a recent, but ultimately doomed, experiment—the creation of “people’s power” on the Caribbean island of Grenada in the wake of the collapse of the eccentric and corrupt Gairy regime. Mobilization campaigns, rallies, and solidarity celebrations, as well as production, disciplinary, education, and emulation committees, were all instituted to try to foster direct democracy from below, rather than to buttress the conventional structures of representative democracy. Supplementing the work of these committees were mass organizations like the National Women’s Organization, the National Literacy Campaign, and the Young Pioneers, all of which were designed to increase the level of popular participation.

The leader of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) in Grenada, Maurice Bishop, like Nyerere before him, denounced the “discredited” Westminster model and its “superficial” democracy. According to Bishop (cited in Payne, Sutton, and Thorndike 1984: 35), “the type of democracy where people walk into a ballot box [sic] and vote for five seconds every five years is not real democracy at all. [This was] a Tweedledum and Tweedledee situation with two parties which were two sides of the same coin simply replacing one another.”

So long as it was the old and impotent former colonial power, Britain, that was in the dock, Bishop’s rhetoric was disregarded internationally. But President Reagan found the PRG’s attacks on U.S. democracy less than palatable and an ideal pretext for the invasion of the island on the grounds that the PRG was in the hands of the communists. This was a bitter lesson in the realities of hemispheric politics—for, in the end, the Bishop regime found itself abandoned by all the Caribbean governments other than Cuba—and all, including Cuba, were impotent in the face of the U.S. military occupation.

The Collapse of Alternatives to Western Democracy

A generous view of the PRG in Grenada could see it as a brave experiment laid low by the political calculations of a vainglorious president of a nearby Great Power, anxious to score propaganda victories to counteract national humiliations in Vietnam and the Middle East. Such a characterization of the collapse of people’s power in Grenada is accurate, while being insufficient. Closer scrutiny of the PRG’s style of governance reveals an inherent contradiction between nominal control from below and real control by the leading cadres. The tension between the fervour of the leading cadres and the relative lack of zeal by the people in whose name they act reveals common and deep-rooted flaws to the alternatives to Western democratic forms proposed by revolutionaries of many hues.

Some of these flaws were raised as early as 1899 by Edward Bernstein, the German Social-Democrat and first major exponent of “the peaceful road to Socialism” (see Gray 1963: 401–407). Bernstein saw an inherent inconsistency between revolutionary conspiracy in the name of socialism on the one hand and democracy on the other. He was probably the clearest thinker from within the socialist movement of the view that socialism could not be established by revolutionary class struggle, because the very condition upon which this form of change was premised, that is, mass involvement, was characteristically absent.

Far from jettisoning truly democratic forms of struggle, Bernstein saw the first requirement for the transition to socialism as democracy itself. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx proclaimed and Lenin seized on, was “political atavism.” Democracy needed “justice” and “equality of rights for all members of the community.” Once they had the vote, workers were “citizens”, not just “proletarians.” Against the Marxist-Leninist scorn for such bodies, he argued that liberal organizations, including the state, were capable of change and development. They should be developed through “organization and energetic action.”

It was not only the revisionists and the Fabians who warned the socialist movements against the abandonment of democratic principles. The great German-Polish revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg (in Looker 1974: 246–247), was equally prophetic in her attack on the likely trajectory of the Russian soviets:

The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress. Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange of experiences remains only with the closed circle of the officials of the new regime. Corruption becomes inevitable … with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life in which only the bureaucracy remains as an active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule.

Luxemburg’s vision proved to be all too germane to the state socialist regimes of the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. In nearly every Comecon country, the legitimacy of the ruling party has collapsed— Western democracy and “the market” are triumphant. Only in a few outposts where the old men with their bloodstained hands precariously hold power—Albania, China, Pol Pot’s region of Kampuchea—do primeval notions of vanguardism, the party acting in the name of the proletariat, still hold sway.

While the crisis of the state socialist world has notably been at the political level, as Peter Lawrence suggests in his contribution to this book, socialist economic rationality has also been fundamentally confounded. The apparently irrefutable notions that production should be geared for need, not profit, that rationality and cooperation under socialism could replace waste, greed, and exploitation under capitalism—these ideas have been largely discarded in the countries where they were once proclaimed from the mountain tops. As Lawrence makes clear, even socialists cannot now avoid the conclusion that advanced capitalism has produced goods people want, under conditions where the lot of the majority has been improved, and where the political system, however limited, is more open and democratic than anything state socialism has been able to achieve.

Pressures for Democracy in Africa

What is the relevance of this comparative discussion of socialism and democracy to the African context? For a start, it is clear that African states cannot remain insulated from the world currents in support of Western-style democracy. As I write (early in 1991), the demands for pluralism and multiparty democracy in Kenya and Zambia are making headline news. President Kaunda has been forced to concede a referendum on the future of one-party rule in his country. As Goulbourne documents in the final chapter in this book, in many other African countries similar demands are increasingly becoming less sotto voce, even within the governing parties and élites.

The pressure to join conventional patterns of representation and democratic expression has also deeply affected the liberation movement in South Africa. In a tightly argued theoretical and practical analysis, Glaser exposes the indifferent record and vacillating commitment to democracy that the South African left displayed in the past. As he anticipated, however, at least formally, even the most orthodox section of the liberation movement, the South African Communist Party (SACP), is now using the universal code language of the “good democrat.” According to the SACP’s general secretary, Joe Slovo (Sunday Times 22 July 1990): “It’s absolutely clear that, apart from rare moments in history the single party system, the absence of political pluralism, leads to tyranny, … corruption … and the assumption of power by a small, self-perpetuating élite.”

The external pressures on African regimes to conform to the prevailing Western models (and limits) to democracy have also emanated from financial institutions like the World Bank. As Haynes shows in his chapter on Ghana, the strictures of the International Monetary Fund played a role in the abolition of the Workers’ Defence Committees (WDCs) in 1984. Even though power was held firmly in the centre, the WDCs were established by Rawlings as an important part of his public commitment to people’s power. However, because the WDCs did not fit the policies deemed necessary by the IMF—the attraction of foreign investment and the need to reassure senior managers that they were in control of the workplace—they had to go.

Despite this example of political change at the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• About the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Socialism or Democracy, Socialism and Democracy
• Part One: Controversies
• Part Two: Cases
• References
• About the Book and Editors
• Index