DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW - DECOLONIAL MARXISM by Walter Rodney

Available DRM free here.

I've been quoting him, citing him, and letting him live 'rent free' in my head for the last few weeks, now it's time for you to be (re)introduced to one of the more influential pan-Africanists of the latter half of the 20th century.

Pan-Africanism is an odd beast of a political ideology, and that's unsurprising, as most pan-xyz ideologies often become weird 'big tent' monstrosities that lose power and potential after independence or unification, or whatever the biggest, broadest of goals of the ideology tried to do. The Indian National Congress in India, for example, struggled for identity after Indian independence, reaching a bizarre low under the leadership of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. The Pan-German movement began life as a fairly centre-left to left movement in the early 19th century, including Karl Marx of all people amongst its ranks before becoming a right-wing nationalist scheme under Otto von Bismark and eventually being co-opted entirely by the Nazi party by the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pan-Africanism has also had similar highs and lows throughout its history, before becoming remarkably fractured as more and more African and Caribbean states gained political independence throughout the 20th century.

I emphasise political in the above paragraph because Rodney found the independences of many African and Caribbean countries wanting. Largely because, as Rodney argued political independence was insufficient as long as the coloniser maintained dominance, through economic, and educational ties with the bourgeois classes of the various African states. Of course, some of this was largely because the nation-states gaining their independence were doing so within borders and frameworks drawn up entirely by the colonising country. Rodney focuses on Ghana, Tanzania, and his native Guyana, for reasons I'll return to later in this review, but I'll focus on Kenya and Nigeria, as those are the two states that I am most familiar with.

For the sake of demonstration, let's talk about Nigeria. As discussed intelligently by several books, including some that will be featured here in the future, I'm sure, as well as considerably less intelligent by the leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, Kemi Baddenoch, Nigeria as it presently exists is largely a product of the British imagination. Before the British colonisation, there were multiple states and proto-states occupying the land we now call Nigeria. In the north, the Hausa people were largely governed by the Sokoto Caliphate, in the south the Igbo had created the Kingdoms of Nri and the Aro Confederacy, whilst the the Yoruba had created the Oyo Empire, the Egba Kingdom and the Awori Kingdom. When the British formalised rule over Nigeria, they themselves noted the sticky persistence of the Sokoto Caliphate, and had recognised it as a competing state. Now, I say this not to imply that 'civilisation', 'progress', 'culture', and 'history' should only be measured using the relatively arbitrary state of post-Westphalia European nation-statist, or through the relatively narrow guise of Eurasian statism and proto-statism. There's many things wrong with Graeber's final work, The Dawn of Everything, including the title itself, but one of the things he does an excellent job of is outlining the myriad of ways in which human culture has produced culture and 'advancement' outside of the narrow European definition of the term. Nor do I present these states as if they all coexisted at the same time right up to the British incursion into Nigeria, nor are these the 'definitive' pre-British Nigerian political entities, as there are hundreds I'm leaving out.

I am merely presenting this short and imperfect list of pre-British Nigerian states as a rebuke of Nigeria as it commonly existed in the British imagination, both in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries as well as today. That is, as a land devoid of culture, history, politics, and government prior to the arrival of the 'civilising' forces of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British Empires. When it comes to pre-colonial Africa, as well as pre-colonial Australia and the Americas, the common narrative is of a blank slate land, with a blank slate people, devoid of history, agency, culture, politics, and state. So pervasive was this view that Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone described the British Empire as an 'empire of conscience' with a civilising mission in the House of Commons.

This narrative is great, especially for extractive empires, because then there are two things that can be ignored: resource distribution that falls outside of the Magna Carta's definition of 'private property rights' and trade as conceptualised by anything outside of the definitions provided by the East India Company and the Royal Africa Company. This allows them to nullify pre-existing agreements and arrangements using the Western notions of contract law, disrupting trade and ownership patterns that had gone on for centuries, all in the name of 'bringing civilisation', ignoring all that was before as backwards traditions, that pale in comparison to the superiority of British law.

This is key, Rodney argues, for understanding how precisely colonialism became such a violent break in history for the colonised peoples of Africa. In Europe, as the economies matured, they engaged in trade primarily with their neighbours. Even notorious long-time rivals Britain and France were tight trading partners when they weren't at war. Britain also maintained close trading ties with the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Russians, and other continental countries. Indeed, much of the focus of Britain's colonial expansion was to secure goods to trade not with the colonies, which were the source of the raw materials, with the pleasant side effect of producing a captive marketplace, but rather with wealthy fellow European states. This is also highlighted in Parthasarathi's 2011 book Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, where the focus of the burgeoning British textile trade was not in India, but against India, seeking to dominate for Britain itself and then Europe with British textiles before building the capital and power necessary to suppress and replace the Indian textile manufactories. Back to Rodney, he demonstrates how one of the key aspects of early colonisation of Africa was the isolation of individual African economies from each other. Oyo could still trade with Nri, but only through Britain, and with Britain reaping the profits. Of course people were always covertly going around Britain's (and other colonisers) imposed borders but Britain, France, et al.'s efforts to suppress trade between African nations did have a profound impact on the development of the African economies. Of course, the lack of such impositions on the European continent allowed the European economies to advance with considerably fewer hardships. (Of course, there's also certain amounts of colonisation within Europe, especially in Eastern Europe by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, or in Ireland by Britain).

Rodney also expands on the damage the slave trade did to Wast Africa in particular. Due to the technical limitations of the era (you know, sailing ships instead of steam ships), the Trans-Atlantic slave trade centred largely on the region of Africa we now call 'West Africa', for the British portion of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade it centred on the regions we now call Ghana and Nigeria. We see much of this in the cultures of Commonwealth Caribbean countries and Black American cultures that have carried on traditions, music, and folklore from the Asante in Ghana, as well as the Yoruba and Igbo cultures in Nigeria. Rodney outlines the cost, not only in the number of persons recorded as transported, but also in the number of persons killed either during the nightmarish voyage across the sea, with humans packed in ships so tightly they could not move. In such conditions, it was not uncommon for healthy people to succumb to disease, starvation, and suffocation, even those surviving arriving in the 'new world' in such condition that recovery was difficult or impossible. Of course, those killed in the process of capturing slaves is also largely undocumented and also bore a considerable cost. Rodney argues that as Europe imposed the slave trade on the coastal kingdoms of present-day West Africa, the expenditure on armies and military action to capture slaves for the Europeans surpassed developing other parts of the economy, and lead directly and indirectly to the deaths of millions, further inhibiting economic development. The abrupt end to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, complete with Royal Navy blockade in the 1830s was also done in such a way that further undermined African economies, leaving them scrambling to find other exports the Europeans desired. In Nigeria, this lead to the growth of the palm oil trade, and later the oil trade, as these were the only goods the British were willing to buy from Nigeria. For Ghana, the economy came to centre around cocoa.

This, Rodney observes, was all going on whilst British 'economist' David Ricardo was sitting in London writing about 'comparative advantage', but with the British controlling so heavily not only the trade the peoples of Ghana and Nigeria were doing, but also controlling with who they were trading, Ghana and Nigeria were never truly free to find what 'comparative advantage' they could hold, it was all dictated onto them from a foreign economy. Further, of course, Ricardo's example of Britain's 'comparative advantage' in textile manufacturing turned a blind eye to how Britain was obtaining cheap cotton (from the slaves in North America) and how the capital necessary to build those first textile mills in Lancashire was obtained (the Liverpudlian slave trading companies). Considering the previous unpopularity of British wool textiles compared to the cotton textiles, it is more than a bit of a blind spot for Ricardo to have missed that Britain's 'comparative advantage' was artificially constructed, through a series of choices and policies made by the British bourgeois and the British government. This is the lie central to capitalism, if one looks at it as 'natural consequence', 'natural series of events', 'the way things are' then one never seeks to hold accountable the people making the decisions within. That is why these narratives are so important to the bourgeois class, the nice thing about the invisible hand is it can't be caught or held accountable, that's what makes it so important to their belief system.

Rodney also examines the narratives the West began to spin in the context of African liberation, with a certain amount of self-congratulatory nature. In Britain, the independence of Tanzania was 'inevitable, and the goal even, once we could teach them to be self-governing'. Of course, this both infantilises the Tanzanians and creates a patronising relationship between Britain and Tanzania. Further, it overrides and ignores all of Britain's extractive motives and the violence Britain used to maintain the perfect conditions for resource extraction and maximising surplus profit from the value of African labour. I bring Tanzania into the fray here because much of this book focuses on case studies from three countries, Rodney's native Guyana, Ghana, and Tanzania. Ghana, as it symbolised in many ways what Rodney viewed as the already diminishing prospects of African liberation in the mid-20th century. Rodney goes after the nationalist myth that Africa does not have classes, and therefore Marxism can't work in Africa. He argues that class systems do indeed exist in Africa and must be addressed for true liberation to occur. European Bourgeois style nation-statism, he argued, would bring more sorrow to Africa, and see the African bourgeois allying with the European Bourgeois to continue colonialist extraction patterns. I've written elsewhere about the continued domination of the Nigerian oil industry by the Anglo-Dutch Shell Corporation headquartered in London, and how this has led to considerable stagnation in Nigeria. Pretending there is no class in Africa, Rodney asserts, benefits only the bourgeois and will inhibit development in Africa. Ghana is the case study Rodney uses to underline this. Tanzania, on the other hand, in the time of Rodney was trying, through a variety of mechanisms, something closer to Marxism, and so Rodney spends the final third of the book examining how Tanzania was ignoring British-American 'World Bank' style development in favour of a truly African take.

Of course, the tragedy of this is the violent death of Rodney, assassinated 13 June 1980. As such, he would not live to see the long term damage that British trained Idi Amin's invasion of Tanzania would have on the development of Tanzania, nor would he live to see much of the development of Africa, since apartheid would not end in South Africa until 1994, Angola and Mozambique would not achieve independence until 1980, and much of the rest of Africa would suffer lasting repercussions of constant British, American, French, and Belgian interference throughout the rest of the Cold War, inhibiting the development of Tanzania and so many other African countries. Nor would he live to see the 'Washington consensus' as drawn up by Thatcher and Reagan and the immense damage that World Bank/IMF instilled austerity would do to the few success stories there were in Africa. Maybe it's for the better he didn't see this, maybe we'd have benefited from his analysis of the situation. Considering there were already outspoken opponents to the Washington consensus, like Hyman Minsky, it is likely that even if he had lived to see it, he would've been soundly ignored like Minsky was.

My take away from the whole thing is the importance of sombre fact. You cannot talk about the economic development of Europe without discussing capital's tendency to work something like a black hole, sucking all the surplus value into a centre point, away from the periphery that it violently creates, and then destroys. The problems and predictions Rodney makes about African development and the role of the European bourgeois ring true today, with an increasingly small bourgeois stripping everything valuable out of what few state assets remain globally and centralising the capital on a few select cities, London, New York, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul at the cost of everyone outside of those cities, and even at the cost of many inside. This is all aided by nationalistic myths that obscure the reality of how this wealth was generated in the first place. Capitalism has to be sold as the way nature intended, because that discourages further examination, not unlike how Kings had to be sold as divinely appointed.

It all reminds me of Terry Eagleton's observation in Why Marx Was Right, Marxism would cease to exist when capitalism does, since at its core Marxism is a scientific critique of capitalism.