In 1989, with the decline and imminent collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union and China, as well as the turning of so many states that had once been authoritarian and/or had intervened actively in the economy to a model of liberal democracy and free markets, the American intellectual and State Department employee Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history.” By this, he meant that there were no more grand ideas on the reorganization of society—liberal democracy and free markets had come to be the ideal to which all states aspired. As the Soviet Union’s state socialism disintegrated by late 1991, it seemed that Fukuyama’s prediction had come true. There was, it seemed, no alternative to this form of globalization.

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I think, after over a year, and having read widely (to say the least) on Mozambique, I think I’ve arrived at a point where I can write a paper that answers the question that was posed by Saul — though perhaps not according to his framework:

Assess the nature of the chief liberation movement (Frelimo) in [Mozambique], trace that movement’s development in the post-colonial period (including an assessment of any meaningful opposition it has faced), and assess the prospects that that movement has offered and now offers for realizing the meaningful development of the people for whom it professes to speak.

I want to address the question of the relationship between the economic and the political in Mozambique, in the terms of bourgeois scholarship. A good way to get into this is Peter Lewis’s article on the paradox of “growth without prosperity” in Africa. Lewis takes, as his starting point, the notions that a) economic liberalization (market economy) and political liberalization (liberal democracy) share an “elective affinity” because they both rely on openness, transparency, and such, b) that economic liberalization should lead to economic growth, c) that political liberalization should lead to redistributive measures. The paradox is that, despite economic and political liberalization, sub-Saharan Africa as a whole might have seen economic growth (in Mozambique, one of the highest sustained rates of GDP growth in all of sub-Saharan Africa), but human development indicators has not matched up (in fact, is awful) and inequality is high as poverty persists massively.

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As early as 1961, Fanon critiqued in general the movements and leaders of newly independent African states, whose main concern seemed to have been staying in power and aggrandizing themselves or the elites (the underdeveloped “bourgeoisie of civil servants”) on whose support they relied. Fanon also critiqued the concept of négritude as espoused by Senghor—in particular the idea of returning to a pristine past. “We should not … be content to delve into the people’s past to find concrete examples to counter colonialism’s endeavours to distort and depreciate.” Similarly, Nkrumah repudiated the term “African socialism” in 1966, noting that

the realities of the diverse and irreconcilable social, political, and economic policies being pursued by African states today have made the term “African socialism” meaningless and irrelevant. It appears to be much more closely associated with anthropology than with political economy.

Like Fanon, Nkrumah rejected the call for a return to a pristine pre-colonial Africa, noting that no such pristine, classless or non-hierarchical Africa ever existed in the first place. Fanon and Nkrumah were both asserting that there was nothing unique about Africa that immunized its societies from class conflict. Reaching a proper, socialist Pan-African culture was a matter of political practice, not retreat into an imagined culture. Fanon notes that

The problem is knowing what role [African politicians] have in store for their people, the type of social relations they will establish and their idea of the future of humanity. That is what matters. All else is hot air and mystification.

Nkrumah called for a turn toward socialism focusing on the particular conditions facing particular countries, recognizing that “there is only one nature, subject in all its manifestations to natural laws and that human society is, in this sense, part of nature and subject to its own laws of development”—scientific socialism. Fanon called for the creation of a new national culture based on a collective consciousness reached through the mobilization of the masses (particularly the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry), led by a revolutionary party, to stamp out the “useless and harmful bourgeoisie”—class struggle. In other words: revolutionary theory and practice.

Sources

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Nkrumah, Kwame. “African Socialism Revisited.” In The Africa Reader: Independent Africa, edited by Wilfred G. Cartey and Martin Kilson, 200-208. New York: Random House, 1970.

Note: This is kind of stream of consciousness, and I am probably not being as accurate and precise as I could or should be. It’s also, obviously, not comprehensive — the Third World is too large, to write a comprehensive overview is too large a project, and the gaps in my knowledge are even larger. If you’re actually going to bother reading through this, bear with me. I’m writing this so that I can glean from it and turn parts of it into a more comprehensible paper..

The recent collapse of the global financial system has brought renewed interest to Marx, Marxism and socialism in mainstream literature. It’s probable that a lot of this will translate into academic “I-told-you-so” literature as well. The question of Marx here is one of a prescient and penetrating critic of the systemic operation of capitalism. Globalization typically refers to the proliferation of neoliberal ideology, policies and practice throughout the world starting in the 1970s, reaching a high point in the late 1980s as all and sundry adopted neoliberal capitalism as the way to go, and a surfeit of academic and activist analysis of globalization as globalization with the anti-globalization movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, in the Communist Manifesto — published in 1848 — Marx and Engels wrote of capitalist production and ideology spreading throughout the world, remaking it in its own image. They also pointed out that the systemic operation of capitalism led to recurring crises — crises through which capitalism could reinvent itself or which oppositional forces could exploit (so to speak) to bring about a more just and equitable state of affairs.

One might think Marx and Engels to be prophets, but that the capitalism they were describing was the capitalism of the 19th century. Indeed, capitalism has changed since then — through several crises capitalism has been reinvented, reshaped, compromised and reestablished. But in many ways it remains the same, for at its essence is the appropriation by a few of the wealth produced by the many. While there is a form of exploitation intrinsic to capitalism (that of capitalists appropriating the wealth of workers) as a mode of production, there is more to it than just that. For capitalism had to begin somewhere, and the mode of exploitation of workers inherent to it was not always the way it worked. There first had to be a massive accumulation of capital outside the system — what Marx called primitive accumulation. Where did this mass accumulation come from? Locally, in England, it came from the enclosure of the commons (lands peasants would use in common), and the appropriation thereof by landed gentry, kicking peasants off the land and thereby establishing roving bands of unemployed and shitpoor people who had nothing to lose. These migrated to towns and cities to work in factories in shitpoor conditions. Yet there was also the massive pillaging of the Americas, India and parts of Africa, not to mention Ireland, among others. What Marx and Engels saw in their time, even as early as 1848, was the expansion of capitalism to many corners of the world.

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Perhaps the most interesting question in relation to petty corruption is: how do underpaid public employees manage not to practise corruption? (544)

Corruption has provided a source of much sarcastic humour within the Mozambique press. Much of this humour revolves around the representation of corruption as goat-like behaviour, that is, the propensity to ‘eat’ rather than work. While the UK was beset by the ‘mad cow’ crisis, satirist and writer Mia Couto argued that Mozambique was suffering from ‘mad goat’s disease’. The Chinese new year of the Tiger was compared with the Mozambican new year of the Goat. Mediafax published a Cabricionario on 27 May 1996 (cabricionario being a conflation of the Mozambican words for goat and dictionary), providing a subversive lexicon of anti-corruption language. A wonderfully revealing new word suggested within the dictionary was:

CABRITALISMO [conflation of cabrito (goat) and capitalismo (capitalism)] Definition: socio-economic system characterised by the use of state resources for private profit. Distribution policy is made according to the principle ‘from each according to their patience to each according to the length of their rope’.

This quotation reveals the popular perception-in many ways correct-that corruption is part of economic liberalisation. It also satirises Marx’s famous dictum (from each according to his means, to each according to his needs) to highlight how Frelimo’s bureaucratic order (symbolised here by the queue) has been replaced by a time when individuals each look out for themselves, and the more political power one has, the better one can do this. The phrase ‘each according to the length of their rope’ evokes an image of goats, each with a circle of bare ground around them: larger goats have longer ropes and therefore larger circles of ground to eat from… (547-8)

Graham Harrison, “Corruption as ‘Boundary Politics’: The State, Democratisation, and Mozambique’s Unstable Liberalisation,” Third World Quarterly 20, no. 3 (June 1999): 537-550.

The growing complaint was that the resulting programs did not facilitate the student’s gaining any more enlightened comprehension of Mozambican realities and therefore did not provide an adequate guide to action. Reiteration of the so-called laws of the dialectic and other such dubious formulations tended to take pride of place over developing an analysis of Mozambican realities in Marxist-Leninist terms. The result? In the formal school system it was more the political demobilization of the students than it was the reverse. Before long most of the programs in the schools had actually disappeared, although subject to ongoing efforts to revive them. At the university students took to calling the Department of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, charged with providing political-cum-social science courses to all faculties, the “Department of Diabolical and Hysterical Materialism.”* (143)

John S. Saul, ed. A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.

* Following E.P. Thompson, I guess.

Aquino [de Bragança, director of the African Studies Centre at Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University], speaking at the journalists’ club on 13 August 1977, remarked that ‘bourgeois’ journalism could often be much better, from a professional standpoint, than journalism of the left. He recalled that when he was in Moscow, since he was unable to read Russian, he looked for papers in French or English, and found that L’Humanité, the daily paper of the French Communist Party, was the only one readily available. ‘After reading it, I was convinced they were going to take the Bastille,’ he remarked drily. He had to find someone with a subscription to Le Monde if he wanted to know what was going on in the world. (53)

Paul Fauvet and Marcelo Mosse, Carlos Cardoso: Telling the Truth in Mozambique. Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2003.

Mozambicans are now beginning to insist that, while the world’s best economists may not be as bright as peasant farmers, they cannot possibly be that stupid. Could it be that the IMF programme really is successful, but that it has different goals and a different agenda from what the Mozambicans are told? (107)

Joseph Hanlon, Peace Without Profit. Woodbridge: James Currey, 1995.

But it was rather disconcerting … to find the World Bank standing marginally to the left of spokespersons from the Mozambican government. (105)

My friend also referred to a long series of discussions he and I had had over the years (including during the period when I had taught at the FRELIMO party school) in which I had often emphasized the costs of FRELIMO’s embracing the particularly lifeless brand of Marxism on offer from the Soviets as the ideological instrument for codifying its radical intentions. We should probably have listened more to you, he said lightly, then - in a wry voice - ‘Of course, you didn’t have in your briefcase the military hardware that we also felt we needed’! (107-108)

John S. Saul. “Mozambique: The Failure of Socialism?” Transformation 14 (1991): 104-110.

[On] 15 June 1980, President Samora Machel announced on the radio that the old ‘escudo’ [currency] would be replaced, one for one, by a new ‘metical’, over the following three days….

To reduce the number of people in the bank queues, people with jobs were encouraged to bring their money into the workplaces and one person would queue for them all. On Monday the office manager told us all to bring in our money the next day, and we did. I handed in about a month’s salary as did 40 other people, and he went to queue at the bank. It was late when he reached the front of the queue, so he took the bag of new money home and gave it to us the next day. No one thought it was strange. This was what Samora told us to do. Everyone knew that anyone walking away from a bank had a huge pile of money. Yet we heard no stories of people being robbed….

There was total trust — a belief that Frelimo was working for you and that everyone was working together to build something new. (101)

Joseph Hanlon and Teresa Smart, Do Bicycles Equal Development in Mozambique? Woodbridge: James Currey, 2008.