NEWS & LETTERS, September-October 2010
Black/Red View
by John Alan
Africa in Philosophy and Revolution
Editors' note: In celebration of the Dunayevskaya Centenary and the 50th anniversary of the Year of Africa, we reprint Alan's column on her Philosophy and Revolution from the Dec. 1973 N&L.
Philosophy and Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya, is a unique book, both in its original scholarship and in the rare ability of the author to put the blood of humanity into what first appeared to be the most "abstract projections" of Marx and Hegel.
In no other book on the same subject is the reader made so aware of the inseparability of theory and practice, or of the relationship between the force of the objective world, on one hand, and that of the subjective world of human passion and reason, on the other.
The space of this column precludes a full review, but I would like to zero in on Chapter 7, "The African Revolutions and the World Economy." This chapter is brilliant in its delineation of the birth of the African Revolutions and in its analysis of what went "wrong"--both in and outside of those revolutions which have so grievously denied the African people of their idea of freedom that they "propounded as an absolute."
In the 1960s the African Revolutions sprang into being upon a world of ideological pessimism in retreat from the very possibility of revolution and totally dominated by Cold War politics. At that time Africa boldly called for a new universal humanism, based upon solidarity and co-operation between peoples "without any racial or cultural antagonism, and without narrow egoism and privilege"--a concept alien to the ideologists of the developed countries who were so mesmerized by the Cold War, or so insulated by racial chauvinism, that they could not hear what was new and revolutionary in the African struggles against colonialism.
HUMANISM INSPIRED AFRICAN REVOLT
As the author of Philosophy and Revolution puts it: "The African revolutions opened a new page in the dialectic of thought as well as in world history....The truth is that while 'backward' Africa was charged with a dynamism of ideas that opened new paths to revolution and looked for new roads to development, the Cold War reigning in the 'advanced' United States, produced so pervasive a malaise among bourgeois intellectuals that they proclaimed 'an end to ideology.'"
The very opposite was taking place in Africa at that time, and was made historically possible due to the spontaneous mass actions of the African peoples in search for new Humanist beginnings which would unite a philosophy of revolution with the practice of revolution. This desire was not limited to the intellectuals but was keenly felt and understood by the masses of the people.
The question is: with such a great beginning, what happened in less than a decade that caused the African Revolutions to turn into the very opposite of their original purpose? In exploring this phenomenon Dunayevskaya does not minimize the introduction of neocolonialism into Africa--so tragically expressed by the UN's intervention in Congo and the murder of Lumumba.
However, she considers the greatest tragedy to be the internal one, the separation of the leaders from the led. She points out that: "without masses as reason, as well as force, there is no way to escape being sucked into the world market dominated by advanced technologies, whether in production or in preparation for nuclear war."
Nkrumah and Ghana exemplify how easy it is for an "underdeveloped" nation and its leaders to slip into the grasp of neocolonialism once the leaders abandon the masses, the reason and force of revolution, and turn to one of the two poles of capital--U.S. or Russia--in hopes of achieving technological sufficiency.
AFRICAN REVOLUTIONS AND PHILOSOPHY
At this point, the aim of the Revolution shifted from its original Humanist purposes to one solely concerned with industrialization, and the leaders began to look upon the masses as mere labor power. As Dunayevskaya explains, to understand the internal cause for the retrogression of the African Revolutions, you have to see not only the contradictory economic relationships between the developed and the underdeveloped nations, but also among the developed nations themselves.
The economic sources of neocolonialism are examined by going to the heart of the internal crises of world capitalism: The falling rate of profit, plus a decline in the rate of accumulation of capital in the West, makes any real industrialization of the underdeveloped countries an impossibility. "Neocolonialism is not something invented by the Communists or the Africans, but is a fact of existing world capitalism."
However, Dunayevskaya does not end on this note. Totally aware of the "miracle" of the 1960s, when African mass actions achieved freedom from direct colonialism and thereby shook world imperialism to its foundations, she emphasizes that the goal of Africans to dethrone neocolonialism will be achieved through a new reunification of philosophy and revolution.
|
