Fukuyama’s prediction was based on the benefits that globalization was supposed to bring to all countries, but the social effects of adopting a program of free markets as imposed by international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, were often dire. Many lost jobs, lost social security nets of healthcare and education, costs of living soared, as did poverty and inequality—these adverse effects were felt most pointedly in what were once known as Third World countries.

To counter not only the effects but the very logic of globalization, a worldwide grouping of movements arose by the turn of the twentieth century, and the slogan of this anti-globalization movement was that “another world is possible.” Their opposition to globalization was most effectively demonstrated in mass mobilizations against meetings of international financial institutions in Seattle, USA in 1999 and Quebec, Canada in 2001, as well as through the meeting of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. Asserting both the necessity and possibility of “another world” so visibly, the anti-globalization movements seemed to challenge head on Fukuyama’s claim of the end of history.

Yet, the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York seemed to sap the anti-globalization movement of its vitality. George W. Bush’s administration launched a war in Afghanistan later that year that went largely unopposed by genuinely popular movements, but when such a movement arose on a hitherto unforeseen global scale to oppose the American invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003, it met not only with immediate failure but rapid disintegration. It seemed that another world was, indeed, possible, but it was not the one that the anti-globalization movement was looking forward to. It was one where authoritarianism and the belligerence of the world’s remaining superpower was unchecked, and while the World Social Forum continued to meet it and its associated movements seemed to wither.

Our current moment is one of global crisis—global crises of food, of the climate, of the entire globalized economic system, and of health. The end of history, it seems, has long ended. In fact, even as these global crises have developed, new movements have arisen or older ones have been reinvigorated, particularly but not only in the Third World. The “pink tide” of left-leaning and leftist governments in Latin America has provided a glimpse of an alternative globalization challenging the logic of liberal democracy and free markets. Meanwhile, in certain parts of South Asia, communist movements seem to be making inroads through combinations of armed and electoral struggles. Indeed, the very election of Barack Obama in the United States suggests the widespread desire for “change”—for another world—involving an end to wars and the provision of greater social security. In other words, even as it seems that the entire world is careening toward a catastrophic crisis, movements on the ground and in government in many countries are attempting to build, precisely, a better world. While we can guess at the outlines of another world, only through active participation can we make the possible probable and give it substantive content.

This piece is written for class. The idea is to be able to communicate effectively in non-academese for a general audience.

According to the statistics of UNICEF, every year 16 million children die from hunger or curable diseases in the third world. This means that every four years there is an equal number of deaths of children as all the deaths of World War II, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Bengal famine combined. Every four years a world war against children. There you have the world reality of imperialism and capitalism in a nutshell.

The figure is now, according to UNICEF, about 9.2 million children who every year die “largely preventable deaths.” But that’s only children under the age of five. It’s difficult to find statistics that deal with everyone above the age of five. Every seven years a world war against children.

مخدوم محی الدین

yeh qatl qatl kissi ek aadmi ka nahin
yeh qatl haq ka musaawaat ka sharaafat ka
yeh qatl ilm ka hikmat ka aadmiyat ka
yeh qatl hilm-o-murawwat ka khaaksaari ka
yeh qatl ek ka do ka nahin, hazaar ka hai
khuda ka qatl hai qudrat ke shaahkaar ka qatl
yeh shaam shaam-e-ghareebaan hai subh subh-e-hunayn
yeh qatl qatl-e-maseeha yeh qatl qatl-e-husayn

This murder is not the murder of any one person
This is the murder of truth, of equality, of decency
This is the murder of knowledge, of wisdom, of humanity
This is the murder of tolerance and kindness, of humility
This is the murder of not one or two, but that of a thousand
This is the murder of God, the murder of the masterpiece of providence
This evening is the evening of desolation, this morning the morning of Hunayn
This murder is the murder of Christ, this murder is the murder of Husayn

Makhdoom Mohiuddin

(My translation)

Update: This poem was translated into Persian by Eskandar. Makhdoom wrote this poem upon the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr (in 1968). It is the first of three parts, but I’ll leave the other two for later.

Shaam-e-Ghareeban is literally, “evening of the poor,” but I learned from Eskandar’s translation that this refers to the commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn (see below) on the 10th of Muharram (Ashura), and so, following Eskandar, “evening of desolation” it is.

Husayn ibn Ali was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin. He was killed (martyred) by Yazid’s forces — many considered Yazid to be a usurper of the caliphate — at the Battle of Karbala.

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.

So the question Lewis asks is why political liberalization hasn’t led to redistributive measures and better human development indicators. His answer is twofold: i) on one hand, neopatrimonialism (networks of clientelistic linkages between ‘big men’ in government and their social support bases), which defines the “nature of politics in Africa”, undermines a properly democratic structure — i.e., political liberalization has only been skin-deep, ii) on the other hand, the pervasive influence of international donors and lenders (IMF, WB) and their singular focus on neoliberal models have led to perverse outcomes with respect to generalized prosperity.

Now something becomes evident here — notably that Lewis is not your typical bourgeois scholar, in that he’s actually concerned with redistribution of wealth. However, this is not so typically unbourgeois, especially in African studies in this day and age. The IMF and WB line, as well as that of the imperialist powers (G7, G8 types) focuses, of course, on poverty reduction. What is important to note, I think, is Lewis’s fundamental assumptions — that economic liberalization and political liberalization, if they didn’t have to deal with the messiness of, well, actually-existing economics and politics, would somehow both lead to economic growth and more redistributive measures. What’s also not typically unbourgeois is the emphasis Lewis puts on neopatrimonialism.

There’s a few critiques of neopatrimonialism that need to be hashed out. Thandika Mkandawire points out that calling a state neopatrimonial tells us, well, not much. States described as neopatrimonial have pursued different types of policies — all of which have been described as results of neopatrimonialism. So, in seeking to explain everything, the concept doesn’t really explain anything, except to note that capitalist relations don’t exist in their ideal forms in African states.

One of the reasons Marxist analysis was often seen to be irrelevant in analysis of Africa was because, well, class didn’t exist in Africa (apparently). There was a giant rural population, which could be categorized as “peasantry” in the same way as a sack of potatoes could be categorized as a “sack of potatoes” (well, there’s an application of Marx) — i.e., nothing actually held them together (no class-consciousness) other than the accident of geography. The working-class in urban areas was small. There was no bona fide bourgeoisie in the sense of a domestic capitalist class (unlike in India, or even Russia and China when they had their revolutions — because the capitalist class was the colonizing race). The landed classes were significant in some countries (i.e., with feudal-ish relations), but it was unclear to what extent they were organized. The petty bourgeois then became a bourgeoisie, but not as a result of their control of capital, but their control of the levers of state and the rents that accrued to them therewith.

So neopatrimonial analysis often steps aside the issue of class because it looks at vertical linkages — big men controlling bases of support based on the exchange of material benefits — rather than horizontal class-based linkages.

Yet, what happens when there are burgeoning or actually-existing classes? What happens when you can actually point out horizontal, class-based linkages? Or point out how the development of burgeoning bourgeoisies leads to certain forms of intra-class conflict — i.e., people are in fact vying for the control of the levers of state for greater access to rent, resources, etc., but the people who are vying for those levers already constitute a certain section of the population in terms of class.

What happens, moreover, when you can also point to the existence — however shortlived — of horizontal linkages among peasants? The Chinese revolution turned a lot of Marxist thinking (where the proletariat, i.e., working-class, was the revolutionary agent) on its head. The Chinese showed that, yes, the peasantry could be mobilized as a revolutionary class. To some extent, the mobilization of the peasantry in Mozambique showed that there could be certain degrees of class-consciousness (though, a lot of this was based on opposition to the oppressive apparatus of Portuguese colonialism and its indigenous intermediaries who benefited from the oppressive state of affairs).

The question of neopatrimonialism, and its connection to liberal democracy, then becomes this: What are the analytical classes that we can determine (i.e., “class-in-itself” — class as an economic category, representing relationship to means of production), and what are the political classes that we can determine (i.e., “class-for-itself” — class with consciousness of its own interests) — if, indeed, such classes can or do exist. What are the factors that prevent working classes (I am referring to rural, peri-urban, and urban working masses) from making use of the existing democratic structures to, well, vote the way they (one would presume) ought to vote?

The issue is raised interestingly in a recent study on Nepalese liberal democracy. The authors assume that peasants should have voted for the Maoists back in the 1990s — because the Maoists were the only ones who were all about land reform — but they did not. (Since the end of the People’s War, of course, the Maoists surprised everyone in the world by winning the greatest number of seats in the Constituent Assembly.) In fact, the Maoists seem to have been better to mobilize peasants for armed struggle than they were at getting their votes back in the day. Why was this? The authors attribute this to the fact that the way peasants accessed land — through patrons, of whom they were clients — also affected the way they voted. That is, they voted the way local patrons wanted them to vote (for established bourgeois or compromised parties), else they risked losing their access to land and resources, connections and networks. When the Maoists used violence to get rid of these patterns of access to land, and when other peasants saw that this form of class conflict could lead to actual improvements, they supported the insurgency. And, we can see from the latest elections, they supported the Maoists in droves. So one of the questions I have to look at is what applicability a kind of “local interference” model has to the Mozambican context.

But then one of the more important factors in the Mozambican context is the role of the two major parties: Frelimo and Renamo. There’s pretty much no one else to vote for, and they’re both market economy, yada yada types. It does appear that, while the same imperatives of vote coercion do not exist in Mozambique as they do in Nepal (and India and Pakistan), there are other factors operating here. The first set of post-war elections saw, apparently, a general trend of people voting for whatever party was hegemonic in the area. Frelimo won massively. But the presidential elections were not as straightforward. In any case, the next two set of elections saw a massive drop in voter turnout. Instead, it appears that at least in some cases that many people are directing political grievances outward in violent ways (in the northern parts, Cholera riots, in the capital Maputo, fuel riots).

What’s significant is that patron-client links may operate on a local level, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of ethnic or regional based vertical patron-client linkages are operating. Indeed, Jason Sumich points out that there is something of a ruling class. One can certainly point to the existence of an upper-class in Mozambique, both a bourgeoisie based on domestic capital and a bourgeoisie based on its comprador linkages to international aid/control of state resources — in many cases, there is overlap as well. The significant factor of the national/comprador bourgeoisie is that it is linked deeply to Frelimo in various ways. The point is that the rich overlap startlingly with the rulers. I.e., there is a ruling class, at least a nascent one, with strong horizontal linkages. (I think there is a book in French somewhere that just looks at the social linkages of leading members of Frelimo.) Disagreements and conflict within Frelimo have rarely, if ever, led to splits in the party (since 1969) — its leading members are a tight-knit unit. They are all rich. Even the wife of the late Samora Machel, Graca Machel, who is now working with NGOs (and is now married to Nelson Mandela), is quite well-to-do, and still sticks with Frelimo.

So if we’re talking about neopatrimonialism, well, one thing is evident from Frelimo — it’s not a personalistic, big-man type of thing. They’re quite collegiate. So what are we talking about when we talk about vertical linkages here? It doesn’t really operate in the same way as it is purported to do so in other states, and to see why that is we have to look at the operation of political representation in post-socialist/post-conflict Mozambique in historical context.

Argument 1: The formation of an economic elite-ruling class

In fact, the first argument I want to make is that the formation of the nascent ruling class — the politico-economic elite that rules Mozambique — is linked to the alienation of Frelimo from its stated bases, i.e., the rural peasantry and the working class. This alienation itself occurred in waves. The first perhaps went from independence in 1975 to 1983: a) Frelimo’s political organization (e.g., democratic practice) was not robust enough, b) its economic policies were disastrous or largely inconclusive with respect to their usefulness, c) its socio-cultural reforms were not well implemented, too heavy-handed in some cases. Although these factors led to alienation in some respects — particularly among many sections of the peasantry, there was still a considerable degree of support for Frelimo and its practices. Moreover, Frelimo was self-critical enough to take steps to correct its practice. However, these steps also led to some alienation.

In 1983, the party held a congress where it revised its economic policies. Part of this involved a little bit of economic liberalization (e.g., allowing certain members of the party to accumulate certain amounts of land, business, or something like that — I need to check on this, as it might have been in 1986 after Machel’s death that Joaquim Chissano undertook this). The question of the relationship between party and state was also studied — as there was little to distinguish the party from the state apparatus.

But strangely enough, right after the congress, Frelimo carried out “Operation Production” where supposedly unproductive people were expelled from cities (due to overpopulation concerns) into rural areas to become productive. Prostitutes and thieves, and generally a lot of people, were the subjects of this expulsion. In one case, if I recall correctly, a university professor was carted off (I think this is in Cardoso’s biography by Fauvet). This alienated a lot of people from the party, because before now Frelimo was seen as being for the people, not against it.

However, also very significant during this period and after this was the ratcheting up of the war of destabilization being waged first by Southern Rhodesia (until Zimbabwean independence in 1980) and then South Africa. The economic collapse, and the steady devolution of Soviet aid, led to Frelimo’s turn to the west: joining the IMF and WB in 1984, and settling a peace agreement with South Africa (which, of course, racist apartheid Pretoria violated soon). The war stepped up in 1986 and kept going — starting in 1986 is when the Soviet Union provided the greatest amount of assistance to Mozambique, technical, yes, but no doubt also military.

In 1986, Samora Machel died/was killed by South Africans. Economic differentiation increased as party strictures had been relaxed and party members began to accumulate money. In some areas, forced labour was reintroduced to meet export quotas for cotton and other crops. In 1987, Frelimo capitulated and implemented a structural adjustment program, and introduced high user fees for education and health. Food prices went up as subsidies went down. Folks in cities and in rural areas were turned off. Many people, more-or-less middle-class thus far, in the cities lost their jobs with the bureaucracy. This led to yet more alienation.

As Renamo (the belligerents) made inroads into occupying large areas of Mozambique, Frelimo’s authority and reach declined as did its popularity. The state wasn’t quite a failure, but it just wasn’t everywhere. Renamo was not necessarily better than Frelimo rule, and in fact it was often worse, but it did manage to establish some kind of social base. (More on this as it becomes significant in Argument 2.)

Yet, because Frelimo controlled the state apparatus, and because the privatization taking place through the structural adjustment program of the IMF/WB was operationalized through the state, Frelimo members happened to get good tracts of land, businesses, state enterprises, and so on. In 1989, Frelimo officially abandoned Marxism-Leninism and let anyone into the party, capitalists, business owners, chiefs, so on — and so enter the party they did. The process of privatization, guided by Frelimo, continued into the 1990s and even later. Being in government, controlling the state, Frelimo members enriched themselves. Corruption, once unheard of in socialist Mozambique, was the order of the day. Meanwhile, rich people joined Frelimo, and became part of government, controlling the levers of state.

So what you got here is the formation of a ruling class defined by income/relationship to means of production and access to means of governance.

Argument 2: The re-extension and consolidation of party-state control through political liberalization

Why is it that a ruling class, as such, would turn to democratization and even take upon decentralization, which would threaten its rule? Economic elites in the United States, for instance, are not necessarily closely tied to either of the two parties, and put their eggs in both baskets (does this make sense?). This is not true of Mozambique — if Renamo wins many Frelimo members lose their access to government and state. I think what is going on is that Frelimo is using democratization and decentralization as a means to expand state reach, incorporating potentially oppositional elements into state apparatuses, and then looking to hold on to state power by just about any means necessary. What this means is that democratization and decentralization, rather than being ways for, well, democratization and decentralization, are actually ways for Frelimo to re-extend and further extend its reach. By controlling formal levers of power and with a very poor population without counter-hegemonic political organization, this means the ruling class rules well.

Indeed, it seems that if Frelimo didn’t have to undertake democratization and decentralization, it wouldn’t. Part of the answer is that Frelimo had and has to undertake democratization and decentralization largely in response to pressures from international donors and bodies, which was tied deeply to the process of reaching a peace settlement with Renamo. The continuing insistence of international bodies, and Renamo, for Frelimo to democratize and decentralize in various ways is a tremendous amount of pressure. Underlying this, at least until until about 2000 or so, was the threat of Renamo taking up arms and returning to the bush. That hasn’t happened yet, nearly 17 years later (after peace accords were signed in 1992), and the very existence of a split in Renamo that led to the recent creation of a third-force political party (MDM, more on this later) indicates some level of normalization of liberal democratic practice. Indeed, Carrie Manning calls this “elite habituation” to democracy, or some form of it. Yet, it should be noted that Frelimo has always undertaken democratization and decentralization with varying levels of reluctance, and with a strong focus on unitary, centralized government.

What is key to look at in examining the establishment of electoral democracy, with the first general elections taking place in 1994, is that there was a tremendous effort at reaching out to the various areas in Mozambique and to push the state apparatus into all of these areas. This is important, as the war had created a situation where the state was not able to consistently and reliably reach all areas of the country, it had been largely delegitimized due to its absence or its enforced absence (i.e., retreat from public welfare), and increasing gaps between rulers and ruled. The first set of general elections saw a strong effort by the Mozambican state — the Frelimo state — to establish reach everywhere.

The first set of general elections seems to have resulted in parties winning in districts/areas where they were already dominant and hegemonic. Half the country voted for Renamo — largely in rural areas in the Centre, the other half for Frelimo — largely in urban areas and its ‘heartland’ rural areas in the North and South, but overall Frelimo won. Frelimo has resorted to corruption and underhanded methods to win subsequent elections (not as if Renamo hasn’t, it just hasn’t been able to use these methods to win), though its rigging didn’t change the outcome of the elections. Whatever democracy means to most Mozambicans, it’s unclear to what extent the support for parties actually changes in significant ways in districts and provinces.

Winners take all in the Mozambican elections, and that includes the ability to appoint governors in each of the provinces, and, as far as I can tell, every position down to district administrators. However, this system exists parallel to a municipalities law (implemented reluctantly by Frelimo, the first set of elections in 1998 were boycotted by Renamo), where 33 municipalities have been declared and local elections take place for municipal assemblies and mayors. Needless to say, Frelimo controlled that whole pot until 2003, when Renamo took part in municipal elections. However, even now Frelimo dominates in municipal assemblies — 42 of the now 43 municipalities — and has mayors in 41.

To be sure, this form of decentralization opens up some space for new voices — in some cities, candidate lists have been assembled by citizens’ groups unassociated with either Frelimo or Renamo (except that they are often former members or sympathizers of Frelimo). Yet, overall, the acquisition of land and business in urban areas proceeds along the same lines as it does in rural areas — i.e., dependent on how well one is connected to Frelimo. (Note, this is in a country where the state officially owns all land.) Representative democracy also undermines previous institutions of direct, popular democracy, but that’s not central here.

What happens to the rural areas, though? One would imagine that, exercising considerable influence there, Renamo would push for decentralization in rural areas — and, indeed, it does. Yet, perhaps the way Renamo does this is ultimately counterproductive for its own goals. Renamo’s opposition to Frelimo back in the day, and its campaign of destruction, was predicated on support for “traditional authorities” (i.e., régulos who had been appointed by the Portuguese, and weren’t always so “traditional” — where “traditional” refers to pre-colonial). Frelimo was strictly opposed to traditional authorities (in theory, anyway). During the peace process, and even now, Renamo largely pushes for this idea of recognition of traditional authorities. A lot of push also came from international donors, NGOs and post-modern scholars who looked at “traditional” authority as being somehow more authentic and representative, or something.

Yet, starting in the late 1980s, Frelimo started courting chiefs — by allowing them membership in the party, for instance, and calling upon them to in some cases exercise some degrees of authority. All this without abandoning its top-down appointment structure. And in 2000, Frelimo passed a decree recognizing traditional authorities — or more accurately, “community authorities” found legitimate by a “community.” So, this could include the secretaries that Frelimo had introduced for administration in various parts of the country back in the day and who persisted. What the decree did was to open up new sites of contestation of who, exactly, was a legitimate, “traditional” authority. But it also extended, once again, the reach of the state by establishing (or, in some cases, re-establishing) layer of bureaucracy/administration. Frelimo especially attempted to court these traditional authorities, and even link its own leadership as a traditional lineage (Machel to Chissano to Guebuza, how traditional).

Needless to say, this sucked the wind out of Renamo on an overall level, because now Frelimo was recognizing “traditional” authorities, or community authorities, found to be “legitimate.” In the absence of the kind of democratic structure in place in municipalities, overt party politics would seem to have less influence here. (But that’s not necessarily the case, as is evidenced by Frelimo’s courting of these authorities.) In any case, the extension of the state is an attempted extension, again, of Frelimo’s authority, attempting to provide legitimation to its rule in Mozambique.

(There is, perhaps, something to be said here about the Mozambican land law, as a consequence of democratization, that many people find to be particularly progressive — though, there are problems.)

Argument (?) 3: What are the alternatives?

Through formal democratization and decentralization, the ruling class of Mozambique, economic elites tied to Frelimo, legitimize their continuing rule domestically and to the international donor people, who are key to their funding. But there are other strategies being employed here to try and keep control over an impoverished population, in particular, a shifting of discourses that elide the socialist history of Mozambique, and that — in crude appropriations of neoclassical economics — place the burden of poverty on the laziness of the poor. (No kidding, Guebuza basically said that. His wife also called on the youth of the nation to take an active role in building its economic capacities.)

This kind of discursive shift is met, in many instances, with skepticism — the youth being exhorted to take a role in economic development, for instance, rolling their eyes and pointing out that there are no opportunities for them to do so, else they gladly would. Moreover, in 2008 soaring fuel prices provoked riots in Maputo, and more recently, people in northern Mozambique, convinced that the rich and powerful (linked to aid agencies and the government) were out to get them rioted against aid workers and government officials trying to sanitize wells to prevent cholera. The people thought these folks were, in fact, poisining the wells to cause cholera. Sociologists in Mozambique have shown these riots to be, in effect, anti-poverty protests.

However, if there is resistance, it is not counter-hegemonic (these instances I’ve noted were sporadic and, as far as I can tell, not very organized) and some new alternatives, such as the Movement for a Democratic Mozambique, are not progressive. The MDM is a split from Renamo, which is also not progressive, and doesn’t seem to have a significantly different platform — at least, not as of yet — but is rooted more in a rejection of the paranoid personalistic politics of the leader of Renamo. Trade unions in Mozambique are weak and, it seems, pliant. Their reach also does not extend toward the rural areas where a substantial portion of income is from wage-work.

Some people look for relatively progressive tendencies within Frelimo. It’s not like they don’t exist, for instance, Marcelino dos Santos, who is magnificently still alive (at 80) and so is the incorruptible Jorge Rebelo, but it seems they are not very central anymore (or at least, no one is listening to them). Joseph Hanlon and Teresa Smart see capitalist development guided by the state with strong welfare policies as the way to go — and see that there are elements within the Frelimo leadership and rank-and-file pushing for this. Yet, the leadership in control — what they call the predatory group — and the larger comprador group (relying on international aid, etc.) of which it is part, are oppositional/skeptical to this approach for a variety of reasons.

So is this it? The socialist revolution that once attempted to mobilize millions has reduced itself to a struggle in the leadership between a corrupt, comprador acquiescence to international capital and a relatively less corrupt, nationalist attempt to build domestic capital? As certain cases show, relatively progressive elements in Frelimo can mobilize mass pressure (rural semi-proletariat and progressive bourgeoisie), through protests, media, and backbencher revolts in parliament, to intervene in issues (I am thinking of the cashew crisis) — but how often this happens is unclear, and likely it’s very rare indeed.

There are peasants’ movements (a peasant association that is pretty small) and women’s movements. But these are also insignificant. Perhaps the demobilization of civil society can be explained by the war, and the lack of political alternatives by the legacy of a one-party state and, also, the war.

The hegemony of Frelimo seems to be based, thus, more on the weakness of any oppositional movement than on its own hard-won legitimacy. It should be noted that participation in general elections declines steadily every year, though it is unclear what the elections in October 2009 will have in store.

Further…

There need to be more surveys and ethnographies done (or, published in English for my benefit) to see how various strate and sectors in Mozambique feel. But what is evident is that there are exploiters and exploited, those who dominate and those who are dominated, and that it is not working out for the masses of poor Mozambicans, who have not seen substantial reductions in poverty — despite the number crunching of the government and associated institutions — in the past decade or so. Some ameliorations have taken place (I think, at some point in 2005, primary education was made free again), but that doesn’t mean that people can afford the registration fees, uniforms, or letting their kids go to school instead of working. Microcredit doesn’t work for the poorest of the poor, and instead makes the better off ones better off (which isn’t to say it shouldn’t be tried, it just … isn’t working for the mass of masses). I could go into more detail about the economics here, but I don’t think it’s necessary.

The point is that economic liberalization led to the enrichment of a few, due to their control of the state apparatuses. Political liberalization was used by these few to consolidate and re-extend their power through their control of the state apparatuses.

Back in 1980, Samora Machel noted the infiltration of enemy agents into the state apparatuses, using their positions to make anti-people decisions, introduce red tape, and to enrich themselves while carrying out the agenda of international capital and imperialism. That the leadership of Frelimo itself devolved into this category of enemy agent, and that this identity became central to the entire apparatus of Frelimo, is a shame. But it calls for the kind of purges and revolutionary struggle called for by Machel. This wasn’t straightforward then, and it’s probably nowhere near as straightforward now. How this will happen, and where it comes from, I have no idea. But I’d like to learn Portuguese and do deeper study to try and find out.

A luta continua.

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.

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.

But this colonial expansion reached its height in the late 19th century, as virtually the entire world was carved up amongst various European powers. No longer was this a question of “primitive” (or original) accumulation, but about a structural imperative of the capitalist system — noted, in various ways, by Marxists like Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, and non-Marxist (but socialist) Hobson. Imperialism was all about using forced colonial labour to extract as much wealth as a state (more typically, its corporations) could–in a sense, exporting excess capital from Europe to the colonies to create more capital; and also to expand markets for commodities produced in Europe. (So, for instance, although India was a massive cotton reserve for England, Indians had to buy clothes processed in England.)

Colonial expansion was the order of the day, and forcefully integrated several areas of the world into a particular, Europe-centred global capitalist economy. This should not be taken as saying that there was no economic integration before imperialism, but that imperialism brought about a new system that was unanticipated and unprecedented in its scope, exploitation and sheer brutality. One might argue that globalization, as a term used in the butt end of the 20th century, was not a particularly meaningful term nor did it refer to a particularly novel phenomenon.

Yet, there’s something to be said about globalization because of something that happened in between the era of high imperialism and the neo-hegemony of capitalism late in the 20th century. Here we can look at the significance of Marx and Marxism not simply as an analytical tool to examine capital intellectually, but also as a particular form of political practice. To quote Marx’s famous dictum, “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Even as capitalism and capitalists ran Europe, massive resistance movements were operating. In the early 20th century, the most significant one was the German Social Democratic party whose intellectuals and outlook was Marxist. The idea was that the initial challenges to capitalism would arise in Europe, as capitalism — being highly developed — would go through such crises as an organized and militant labour movement could take advantage of. Yet, at some point before the first World War, something happened, where the Social Democratic party, becoming a solely parliamentary party, began to lose a revolutionary position and began focusing instead merely on the crises of capital as somehow leading, eventually, to a systemic change. Meanwhile, this process could be sat upon and encouraged through parliamentary methods. The Second International was a group of various trade unions, workers’ parties and other such organizations from all over the place.

When the first World War began, these parties and organizations ended up supporting their own governments instead of actively opposing the war. This caused major splits in the international anti-capitalist movement of the day, for these parties were now accommodating and acquiescing to capital instead of opposing it. But at the end of the war, an anti-capitalist revolution did succeed — in Russia. This was the takeover of power by workers and peasants organized through the leadership of several working-class parties and organizations, most notably the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, Trotsky and others. This communist revolution was significant precisely because it did not take place in the heart of Europe, in an advanced, industrialized country. Rather, it occurred in Imperial Russia, largely agricultural and with a nascent industry — or, an undeveloped country, so to speak. (Soon, there were civil wars in the new soviet republic, as the forces of reaction, along with the governments of Britain, France, America, etc. attacked the Bolsheviks and anarchists, who were also fighting with each other — until relative normalization was reached in the early 1920s.)

There were many socialist and anticolonial movements all over the world, and many of them were already influenced by Marxist thought. The Bolsheviks, internationalists that they were, immediately established a Communist International (Comintern), to which several parties and trade unions affiliated. Many groups split from their reformist parent parties to establish Communist parties — which, in many cases, grew very quickly and even outpaced the social democratic parties they were meant to replace. The case of Communist parties in Europe is generally well known — massive communist movements in Germany, Italy, and France. In the United States, the Socialist Party split and a Communist Party was born. Communist parties were formed in India (then under British rule), in China, in Mexico (incidentally, an Indian helped found the Communist Party of Mexico) and in other parts of Latin America, in various countries in the Middle East, and so on, throughout the 20s and 30s.

In the Caribbean, many leading intellectuals were attracted to and became Marxists. C.L.R. James, from Trinidad, was a leading Trotskyist for many years. George Padmore, also from Trinidad, was an important communist — a member of the Comintern — and also a leading figure in Pan-Africanism organized from London.

However, communist parties didn’t really get off the ground anywhere in Africa, with a few notable exceptions — like the initially racist Communist Party of South Africa which later became one of the most important organizations in the fight against apartheid. However, some nationalist movements were influenced by, and in some cases received material aid, of communist parties elsewhere, e.g., the Soviet Union and France. The Communist Party of Algeria was a branch, or something, of the Communist Party of France and was organized in 1920. Moreover, many leading African nationalists and intellectuals were Marxist or were influenced by Marxism. Jomo Kenyatta, though thoroughly capitalist, actually studied for a while in Moscow. On the whole, however, communism wasn’t that influential in most African countries until much later.

While many communist parties and individuals were creative, highly organized, and deeply rooted in the struggles of the people they were organizing, the Soviet Union and its hegemony in the Comintern was also often problematic when squared against anticolonial and anti-imperial movements. The actions and activities of certain communist parties were also off the wall.

For instance, the Communist Party of India was initially highly involved in taking leadership of peasant associations (the All India Kisan Sabha) and, despite being banned by the British, took a role in tilting Congress to the left and providing key support for the Marxists and socialists in Congress (such as Nehru, Bose and many others) as well as putting pressure upon the conservative factions (led by Gandhi, who thought class struggle was for chumps) through the early 1930s. Yet, when the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in the second world war, the CPI took a position supporting Britain and calling on Indians to join the war effort — you see, what had initially been an inter-imperialist war became a people’s war when the Soviet Union was sucked in. I can see some of the reasoning behind this, but it’s hardly attractive when the British, during the second world war, effectively caused the deaths of 3.5-3.8 million people in Bengal. Congress took the line of opposing India’s involvement in the war, though perhaps not for the right reasons, either. In any case, it was the correct decision to take (later, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — which split from the CPI in 1962 — engaged in self-criticism over this stance). Incidentally, M.N. Roy (the guy who helped found the Communist Party of Mexico) also took the line of supporting the war effort — although by this point he had been kicked out of the Comintern and was not a communist (now a radical humanist, as he called it). India achieved independence from Britian in 1947, and the Communist Party never really recovered from its backward line on a national level, but on local levels in various parts of India the Communist Party was extremely influential, especially the CPI(M) which split from the CPI and then overtook it.

Another interesting occurrence around the second world war is Stalin’s insistence upon George Padmore to stop agitating against British and French imperialism, as the Soviet Union sought to curry favour with the West following the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany. Padmore was having none of it. The Germans and Italians, while definitely responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans (e.g., in Namibia, Tanzania, Libya) were hardly worse than the British or the French in that respect. Padmore resigned from the Comintern and moved to London to continue organizing against all imperialism. The lines of the Comintern were also rather problematic (to say the least) at times for the Communist Party of China — in terms of how they should relate to Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist party, the Kuomintang, before and during the second world war. Of course, after the war, the Communists routed the nationalists for the win, thus establishing in 1949 the Chinese revolution — Red China.

In the 1950s, the French Communist Party had some weird-ass relations to the revolutionary wars in Algeria and Vietnam, because they were worried about how the French public would receive them if they came out forcefully against the French government. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China were providing support to the communists in Vietnam and the FLN in Algeria. The latter was a socialist organization, though not with the kind of analysis of Marxism, and had many Marxists in it, including Frantz Fanon. Yet, it was precisely because of the FCP’s ambivalence toward anticolonial struggles that Aimé Césaire (Martinique was, and is, a department of France and so is represented — several times by Césaire himself — in the French National Assembly) ditched it in 1956. By this time, the Chinese Communist Party was moving steadily away from the Soviet line. Césaire denounced the notions of evolutionism he found in Stalinist orthodoxy and its adherence by the FCP. He noted that, while he was abandoning neither Marxism nor communism, he was looking for Marxism and communism to serve black people, and not for black people to serve Marxism and communism. Respect.

I should also note the problems of adopting terms developed by Marx and Engels to analyze the Western European, and more particularly the English situation, to everywhere else in the world. There are complex modes of production, non-capitalist ones, that have to be accounted for in a language that does not reduce them to merely being feudalism, or, as some Marxists have noted, there is no particular reason the meaning of feudalism cannot be adapted to fit local situations so long as the content of that analysis is concrete. Part of the problem stems from the definite encroachment and incorporation of non-capitalist modes of production into the circuits of capital and capitalist production.

But what’s also important to note here is that right off the bat — whether we take that as Marx or the Bolshevik revolution — Marxism and communism were interpreted and reinterpreted in various ways, different lines, opinions and theories vied for hegemony within parties and within international assocations. There was a tremendous amount of disagreement, many abandoned communism and allegiance to the Soviet Union while retaining Marxist analysis and different forms of Marxist practice. Moving into the post-second world war period, several groups and parties gravitated toward a more Chinese communist line. Shifting away from Soviet orthodoxy, the Chinese placed great stress upon peasant consciousness, protracted work amongst the peasantry and proletariat through people’s war, and alternative models of developing socialism than that of the Soviet Union. The Cuban revolution in 1959 was also significant worldwide but especially in Latin America — where Soviet influence (in terms of arms, money, etc.) was never, at all significant, if at all present.

But I’ve given, perhaps, a (tremendously) condensed overview of communism up to the 1960s. There is a lot more going on here. Socialism, the concept thereof, existed before Marx and before the Bolsheviks. What did not exist was a socialist state. That’s what the Bolsheviks accomplished through a revolution. Yet, not all socialists were, as such, revolutionaries. Or if they were revolutionary socialists, they were not necessarily Marxists or communists. But what the Bolshevik revolution definitely did was provide a greater space to socialist ideas as actually practicable — though there were disagreements about how to get there. It also led to increasing waves of repression in many countries. In the colonies, of course, unionization and other forms of political association were long-banned, allowed very late. But especially now radicals could be put down as potential communist infiltrators, and all of that. In any case, throughout the 20th century, the idea of socialism became quite ubiquitous, especially among anticolonial movements.

For instance, even Gandhi spoke of socialism. Yet, for Gandhi, this was a slow, gradual process that would take a long time, and was based more on the development of self-help organizations than it was on the basis of workers and peasants appropriating the means of production (capital and land). Gandhi was explicitly opposed to concepts of class conflict and class struggle, and definitely opposed to class warfare. This was not so true for socialists in Congress, like Nehru and Bose — who weren’t, at all, communists. Yet after Congress came to power in 1947, Nehru did adopt (despite radical bourgeois measures like land reform) this gradualist approach to socialism — through class conciliation rather than class conflict. What it meant, in effect, was bargaining and compromising with the bourgeoisie, landed interests, local power brokers, and members of upper castes, as the state took a form of mixed-economy approach, with central planning and free enterprise of sorts existing together. Needless to say, India as a whole never really got anywhere on the road to socialism.

In Africa in the 1950s, several anticolonial movements were in operation, leading up to the wave of independence of African states in the 1960s that began with the independence of Ghana in 1957. Many of the leaders of these anticolonial movements, like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, declared their commitment to socialism. Though Nkrumah was somewhat of a Marxist, most of the leaders adhered to something that generally became known as African Socialism. The basic gist here was that traditional, pre-colonial African societies were essentially classless and casteless, with no private ownership of means of production (land, basically). Some, like Leopold Senghor of Senegal, went so far as to call out a distinct “African personality” that was somehow antithetical to a Western philosophy of materialism or some such. (Fanon takes this apart in his chapter “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth.) The point, then was to restore the values and traditions of pre-colonial Africa, and this could be achieved without the kind of class struggle called forth by Marxism. Indeed, part of the problem here was also that many anticolonial movements were urban-based, broad-based, involving several sections of society. They largely maintained that structure in post-colonial times. Perhaps this is why Fanon puts an especial emphasis on the mobilization of the peasantry, which didn’t seem to be what a lot of people were keen on.

Yet, this is precisely, kind of, what happened in the anticolonial struggles in Guineau-Bissau and Mozambique (though not quite Angola). Here the opponent was a particularly intransigent Portuguese colonialism, brutal and ugly (see earlier posts on history of Mozambique). Many newly independent African states, as well as the Soviet Union and China, provided help to the anticolonial movements in these Portuguese colonies. They took up arms, indeed, had to, in order to drive out the colonizers. In Mozambique, this took the form of a protracted people’s war — from 1964 to 1974. Indeed, it probably would have gone on even longer, had it not been for the fact that within Portugal a group of progressive armed forces officers launched a coup (the Carnation Revolution, that then degraded into some liberal bourgeois democratic thing, but let’s not harp on that). The process of setting up base communities in liberated areas of Mozambique radicalized the guerrillas, perhaps a lot more than the broad-based leadership of the liberation movement, FRELIMO. (Note, we are now focusing on FRELIMO, because FRELIMO is what I focus on.) Leadership struggles led to the assassination of increasingly Marxist-Leninist inclined Eduardo Mondlane (with the collaboration of the Portuguese, of course), but eventually led to the coming to power of Samora Machel and Marcelino dos Santos — the latter a seasoned international diplomat by this time and (he’s still alive, mind you) a dedicated Marxist. Samora Machel was the commander of the guerrillas and he, too, had arrived at a commitment to Marxism. The whole movement was leaning toward Marxism, in particular adopting an approach to peasant mobilization that was heavily influenced by Chinese communism (in particular, Mao).

In 1975, all three colonies achieved independence from Portugal. In Mozambique, FRELIMO adopted Marxism-Leninism officially in 1977, and then became just Frelimo. MPLA in Angola adopted Marxism-Leninism, too, but was embroiled in a civil war with rival anticolonial factions (who, incidentally, were supported by South Africa, the United States and … the Chinese — this was ass-backwards, of course). The socialist project embarked upon in Mozambique caught the attention of a lot of people in the world. It was electrifying, because it coincided with, in 1975, the victory of the Vietnamese communists over the Americans. The spread of world socialism, it seemed, was irresistible.

Yet starting in the 70s and continuing into the 80s, Mozambique was harassed by a group of rebels, heavily backed first by racist Southern Rhodesia, and when that became Zimbabwe through armed struggle of Mugabe and co. (now discredited, then acclaimed), by South Africa. The rebels had no real ideology, other than destruction of, well, just about everything. The significant gains made in health and education were reversed. The crappy Soviet-influenced economic policies were capitalized upon to increase alienation against the Frelimo government. By the time the war ended in 1992, the rebels had destabilized the whole country, established themselves indigenously, caused the deaths of one million people, and displaced five million more — this in a country of 15 million. By 1989, Frelimo had abandoned Marxism-Leninism and embraced neoliberalism. The same was going on in the Soviet Union and virtually all over the world. World communism was over. World socialism was far gone. What once seemed irresistible was now irredeemable.

I have three points to make via Frelimo. The first is that the Mozambican adoption of Marxism-Leninism was an indigenous decision, not a result of Soviet agents or anything like that (if anything, Mondlane was evidently close to the American administration). The second is that there was virtually no limit to the destabilization that racist, white capitalist regimes — South Africa in particular — were going to in order to massively screw up the revolution in Mozambique. Samora Machel was killed in a plane crash in 1986, probably caused by the South Africans. Destabilization was also true of Angola, where the Cubans and Soviets helped MPLA fight UNITA, backed by South Africa, America and China (China did some really stupid things sometimes). One should be able to extend this to virtually every communist regime that has ever existed — there was no end of international hostility stacked against it, from the very Bolshevik revolution to tiny Cuba now. The third point is that a considerable degree of the problem was, I think, Frelimo’s shift from a more mass line based Maoist politics to a doctrinaire, even dogmatic Soviet politics — everything was about big, industrial projects being planned by Bulgarian and East German agronomists who knew nothing of Mozambique but hey, “scientific” socialism. This was general orthodoxy, not just Soviet, but it was disastrous. Nevertheless, it is argued by some that Frelimo could have corrected its practice back in the 1980s, and was on its way to do so, were it not for the massive destruction being wrought. (By that, I am not talking about adopting the Maoist line as if it were correct dogma, but instead building upon the vitality of Frelimo’s practice during the liberation struggle and early days of independence.) But all that is now history.

So, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the reversal of Chinese and Vietnamese communism, and with the collapse of the Mozambican socialist project, the nails were put into the coffin of world communism, yes, but also world socialism, once and for all. This is, I think, the true significance of the term “globalization” — for what it refers to is the near total replacement of the very idea of an alternative to capitalism. However imperfect and incorrect these socialist states were, they at least offered the idea of an alternative. Yet here the Soviet Union was going neoliberal, and there seems to be no state more capitalist than China. Capitalism was global, and it was here to stay. This is the End of History, for There Is No Alternative.

Or so it seemed… for Cuba was still socialist, headstrong. Throughout the world many people rebelled against capital — as the Zapatistas launched their armed struggle in 1994 just as the North American Free Trade Agreement was put into place. Meanwhile anti-globalization demonstrators in North America and Europe brought these certain summits to their knees — however, they did so largely with a dismissal of Marxism and communism, in total.

Yet, in India, Communists (Maoists) continued their rebellion, started in 1969 after splitting from the CPI(M), against the central and local governments and power brokers, and were revolutionizing social relations as they took over large chunks of the territory of India. Communists (Maoists) in the Philippines continued their struggle. In Nepal, Communists (Maoists) launched a people’s war. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez was elected president, and while not a communist or Marxist, he is certainly some form of socialist and sees the take over of state power as an appropriate means to implement a socialist agenda. In India, the Maoists operate in 200 of 600 districts. In Nepal, they brought the monarchy and old bourgeois-monarchical democracy to an end and established a Constituent Assembly for the drafting of a new constitution — and became the government at that (though, recently, they have resigned). Recently, in El Salvador, the FMLN became the government — winning the presidency — nearly two decades after their guerrilla war against the elites was negotiated to an end. The “pink tide” in Latin America is generally well-known, and socialism is no longer the kind of bad word it was at the height of American-backed repression (which can be seen, for instance, in Columbia today).

Clearly, communism and socialism as practice still exist in significant sections of the Third World. I think it is a mistake to dismiss the idea of communism, and of course, to dismiss the idea of establishing a socialist society. But it’s also important to recognize that the communists and socialists who are operating have done so through massive struggle, through the refining of theoretical and practical approaches toward revolution and state power, and by critically building upon what came before them. I would say it’s not only a mistake to dismiss the idea of communism and socialism, but it is also a big mistake to dismiss the practical experiences of those who came before (where else are you supposed to learn?). It is a big mistake, also, to dismiss Marx and Marxism — what is needed, rather, is to understand that Marxism has been expanded, and that the method is still rather penetrating and incisive.

There is a global movement toward socialism, and it is a direct result of the oppression of capitalism faced by millions. It’s imperative to support it, and to organize for it. The best way to help, I guess, would be to raise consciousness here, but also to organize for deep change in the way our governments approach other regimes and the problems wrought by capitalism here and now.

The recent burst of mass mobilizations by sections of the Canadian-Tamil community in Toronto has brought to the fore several contradictions concerning the conflict in Sri Lanka and its presence in and connection to Canada. Mainstream media’s responses to the protests have been overwhelmingly racialist, exposing many of the limits of Canadian multiculturalism. In order for Canadian multiculturalism to accept any given group of people as a cultural community, it must define that group by differentiating it from a supposedly mainstream Canadian identity. This focalising Canadian identity—in effect a non-identity—is white and middle-class. Thus, when the Toronto Star publishes an editorial entitled “Protesters vs. the public” [1] it effectively notes that the protesters are not part of the public by pitting (Tamil) protesters against the (Canadian) public. Rather than focusing on the war, media outlets have focused on the inconvenience posed to commuters, thereby shifting attention away from deaths in Sri Lanka to traffic regulations in Canada. Consequently, responses to the protests have largely demonstrated pernicious xenophobia. For instance, in the Toronto Sun, Peter Worthington argues that not using excessive force (e.g., water cannons) against Tamil protesters who block streets is tantamount to “reverse racism” against white Canadians. [2]

But if the coverage of the protests has made certain contradictions about the performance of cultural politics in public spaces in Canada apparent, other contradictions about the negotiation of those politics within cultural communities have also been rendered largely invisible. The impetus comes, once again, from a multiculturalism that defines ethnic, immigrant identities against a supposedly mainstream, local one. The act of defining a cultural community necessarily ignores the cultural, economic, and political differences that exist within that community. When these differences are ignored, political representation to mainstream political actors (i.e. those in the government, political parties, and state apparatuses) is mediated by non-elected, self-appointed community “leaders” who may not, and often do not, capture all cultural and political differences. In fact, the very articulation of those differences is precluded: a-cultural white English-speaking Canadians may lean left or right as individuals, or as voting blocs based on class and region, but the articulation of such political differences is absent in the representations of the politics of minority communities. The responses of politicians, activists, journalists, police and vocal sections of the public to the rallies protesting the war provide key examples of this.

The responses of politicians and police officials who addressed themselves to “the Tamil community” falsely suggest that all the protesters were Tamil and that all of Toronto’s Tamils supported the protests. The paternalism of Mayor David Miller’s deciding to tell “the Tamil community” what it “needs to hear from us” [3] (whoever “us” is) feeds into the blatant racism expressed by other elements of the public. Thus, for instance, in The Globe & Mail Christie Blatchford uses the demonstrations to question not just protest tactics, but also the immigration policies that, according to her, have led to the presence of a worryingly large number of Tamils in Toronto. [4]

Parallel to Miller’s homogenization, though coming from the opposite direction, veteran dissident leftist Judy Rebick notes on her blog that, “in a brilliant action, the Tamil community […] climbed the on ramp on to the Gardiner Expressway […] and sat down blockading traffic for several hours.” [5] While the action, as an object lesson in activist tactics, was brilliant, one can say with certainty that “the Tamil community” neither climbed onto nor sat down on the Gardiner. Rather, a more correct terminology would be what Rebick subsequently calls “a group of Tamil activists.” The tenor of her blog post, however, confirms that she views the Tamil community in homogenous terms. She goes so far as to end her post with the note that “we are all Tamils,” a statement that is problematic on two grounds. First, working in solidarity with others requires acknowledging the lived differences that separate us so that we might use those differences for the purposes of justice, rather than discounting them out of an unhelpfully over-forced empathy. Second, that kind of statement presupposes that there is only one kind of Tamil identity, which everyone else can access. Yet if Tamilness is an identity constructed solely on the basis of one’s presence at or support for the protests, not even all Tamils can be called such.

If Toronto’s Tamil population is being flattened into one homogenized entity by politicians and many leftist activists, that process is certainly not being opposed by some sections of Toronto’s Tamil community. The Canadian Tamil Congress, one of Toronto’s more prominent Tamil political groups, notes that it is “the unified voice of Canada’s 300,000 Tamils.” [6] Its FAQ page shows that it ascribes to all Sri Lankan Tamils the desire for a separate homeland (Tamil Eelam). [7] The history and current reality of a diversity of non-communal and Tamil organizations and individuals within and without Sri Lanka, with varying goals and political objectives—and varying definitions of self-determination for Tamil people—is elided by this construction of Tamil identity. It is impossible for the CTC to be the unified voice of Tamils when Tamils don’t have a unified voice. In other words, to return to Rebick’s rallying cry, we are not all Tamil, if only because there is no one Tamil identity we can be.

At many of the protests, the LTTE-designed national flag of Tamil Eelam (which shares the Tiger emblem) has been a prominent fixture. LTTE soldiers have been venerated as freedom fighters, the prospect of Eelam has been seen as a necessary solution to the war, and LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran has been venerated as a national leader. While this set of views may be influential and even hegemonic within Toronto’s Tamil diaspora, it is not universal. Just as the actions of many of the Tamil demonstrators are not and cannot be the actions of “the Tamil community,” so too are the opinions expressed at these demonstrations not those of “the Tamil community.” In fact, those are not even necessarily the views of all of the protesters present at the rallies, but dissenting, non-LTTE views are not being heard.

To signal toward complexity and difference within Tamil communities is not to deny the Sinhala ethnic chauvinism of the government of Sri Lanka; its use of undemocratic and authoritarian practices to crush dissent; or its use of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and internal colonization against Sri Lankan Tamils. Nor is it to deny that militant Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka has largely been a response to the systematized and legislated discrimination of the Sri Lankan state. The LTTE is, in fact, a legitimate national resistance movement and was—until recently— the de facto governing entity in several parts of Sri Lanka. However, in its progress towards and current operation of that position, it too has often represented an ideology of ethno-religious chauvinism; has used undemocratic and authoritarian practices to crush resistant views and movements–including against dissident Tamils; and has used mass murder, ethnic cleansing and internal colonization against Muslims. The point here is not that the LTTE is just as bad as the government of Sri Lanka—which many Sri Lankans, Tamils and otherwise, think it is—but that a critical left view cannot support the LTTE, except tactically in opposition to the oppression of the Sri Lankan state. Nor can it support the LTTE’s ideology or practice. Thus, the assumption should not be made that support for Tamils in opposition to Sri Lankan state oppression is consonant with support for the LTTE.

It is important that critical leftists in Canada take concrete steps, working with members of the Tamil population and the Sri Lankan population more broadly, to bring to an end the oppression being perpetrated by the Sri Lankan state, but without steamrolling the complexities of the conflict and those affected by it. We must stand for an end to Sri Lankan state aggression, but also for an end to the LTTE’s aggression toward dissident and minority groups. Toward these ends, some concrete steps we should seek to take include:

1. Demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
Critical leftists must stand up for the thousands being massacred in Sri Lanka. To this end, we should engage with supporters of the LTTE and others in demanding an immediate, permanent, and confirmable bilateral ceasefire. Protests calling on the Canadian government to take an active role in bringing about such a ceasefire are important and should be supported, though not uncritically.

2. Oppose the complacency and racism of the Canadian state, media and vocal sections of the general public; and oppose police violence.
The Canadian government continues to turn a blind eye to the conflict, tacitly supporting the Sri Lankan state’s actions. Politicians at all levels have spoken to “the Tamil community” in condescending ways. The media has focused more on the plight of commuters inconvenienced by the rallies than on the thousands of dying civilians. Many Canadian citizens have expressed their xenophobia calling upon Tamils to “go back home”.

Meanwhile, at the rallies, protestors have on several occasions been literally caged into tight areas and police officers have often used excessive force on them. Protestors have been arrested merely for speaking out, [8] and, at times, have been brutalized with no provocation. [9,10]

Police violence and the complacence and racism of Canadian foreign politics, the media and vocal sections of the general public must be opposed loudly and forcefully.

3. Push for a political solution.
This conflict has no military solution. Critical leftists must not stop at the call for a ceasefire, but also push for a comprehensive political settlement that involves more than just the Sinhala-dominant Sri Lankan state and the LTTE. There are many more legitimate representatives of Tamil (including Tamil-speaking Muslim) aspirations and political views than the LTTE, whom the LTTE has repressed. Support must be given to them. However, there can also be no political settlement without the involvement of the LTTE.

The Canadian government does not label organizations as terrorist on the basis of objective criteria, but politically opportunistic ones. Moreover, designating certain groups as terrorist does little to clarify conflict situations, but more often obscures issues. Canada’s banning the Tigers as terrorists suggests that the problem of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism is not one of discrimination and disenfranchisement, but of immeasurable violence and terrorism, and that therefore the solution to this conflict must inevitably and solely come through the military elimination of said terrorist group. Critical leftists, however, must remain firm that any long-term and viable solution to the Sri Lankan conflict cannot be military; it must involve a political settlement.

4. Work toward cross-ethnic solidarity.
Following from the support for repressed and marginalized voices, critical leftists must promote cross-ethnic solidarities in Sri Lanka and in the Sri Lankan diaspora. The fictions of ethnic homogeneity constructed by Sinhala nationalism and by Tamil nationalism must be punctured and repudiated. This does not mean an opposition to the principle of self-determination. Yet however the majority of Tamils in Sri Lanka choose to define self-determination, a lasting peace has to be based on the recognition of the vast complexity, intermingling, and transcendence of ethnic boundaries that constantly occurs in Sri Lanka – both in Sinhalese-dominated and in Tamil-dominated areas. Non-communal political formations must be supported.

To that end, critical leftists in Canada should work towards facilitating the kinds of cross-ethnic solidarity movements and conversations that have been mostly foreclosed by the terroristic strategies employed in Sri Lanka by the armed forces and by the LTTE. While acknowledging and addressing the limitations of Canadian multicultural policies here, we need to capitalise on our distance from the conflict, and the relative peace afforded by that distance (however racialised and restricted it is), to facilitate dialogue.

5. Oppose the Sri Lankan state; criticize the LTTE.
Successive Sinhala ethnic chauvinist governments have precipitated the crisis in Sri Lanka. They continue to do so with impunity. Critical leftists must be absolute in their opposition to the ethnic chauvinism and practical depredations of the parties controlling the Sri Lankan state. The Sri Lankan state has been one of the most significant obstacles toward the achievement of a lasting peace.

At the same time, the LTTE has used civilians as human shields and has engaged in forced conscription. It must be therefore also be criticized and its particular human rights violations not excused or glossed over.

6. Oppose the role of international imperialism in the conflict.
The ideology of twenty-first century imperialism is manifest worldwide. In particular, in South Asia, the discourses of “wars on terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India are smokescreens for governments and imperial actors like NATO and the United States to obscure real, legitimate and popular grievances by focusing instead on military campaigns. This is precisely the strategy currently being used by the state in Sri Lanka against its local Tamil grievances. Furthermore, the Sri Lankan state receives military aid from, among others, Pakistan and Israel—lackeys of American empire. China, too, in increasing its international political reach, has steadily provided arms and funding to Sri Lanka for several years. India has also played a major role through its intervention or absence of intervention, in line with its hegemonic designs in South Asia.

The international dimensions of the conflict are too complex to be examined in detail here. However, we should engage in further study of the international dimension of the conflict as well, for in resisting the violence of the Sri Lankan state, as critical leftists, we are also taking a stance against certain operations of international imperialism. We must recognize, however, that ultimately the problem is one of Sinhala ethnic chauvinism and the lack of meaningful political representation of national minorities in Sri Lanka.

In conclusion, it is important to note that these six items should be regarded as points of departure for critical leftists. By no means is this a conclusive programme on how activists in Canada, whatever their ethnicity or personal connection to the war, should approach the conflict. That sort of conversation is much more difficult, and must be had in conjunction with all the members of Canada’s Sri Lankan diaspora, including its Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim communities.

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.