MIKI TASSENI:
ONE aspect of current political thinking in Africa and around the
world, trying to converge on a leftist newly found energy that has
been missing for the better part of 40 years, specifically since 1968
during the civil rights movement and anti-war march, has been missing.
The criticism of ‘economic hit men’ to use the term popularized by a
former World Bank associate John Perkins as accounting for all
economic failures around the world is among those winds for ease of
psychic effects of competition at the level of economy. Their thesis
about Africa is good governance, and the culprit is IMF and World
Bank; thus history passes them by, totally.
The situation in Africa and around the world, and what the New Left
(recreated) has been saying, reminds one of a phase or formulation by
Frederick Engels, that while the feudal lords and knights were
fighting valiant battles across the centuries, the bourgeoisie were
quietly working to change the tools of production. So at the end of
the day, the feudal mode of production based on the hand mill was
being replaced by the steam mill, in which case the shift to the
capitalist mode of production came about. Many have expressed dismay
at the ‘technological determinism’ of Marxism but the problem as to
how capitalism is eclipsed, not how it is reached.
There are more ancient examples of technological determinism, for
instance human history proper is taken to start with the discovery of
fire, and indeed no animal has discovered fire until now. In Greek
mythology, it was Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, either as
Zeus was withholding it for some crime committed by men, but it is
analytically a more realistic version of the myth of the garden of
Eden – it means that a hero would come around and steal the ‘tree of
life’ that was hidden. Thus with fire history more or less came into
being, and later, with the technology of the scent of the goat,
hunting took a higher form, to owning animals.
Technological determinism fills the pages of theogony (that is,
mythical knowledge of divinity), for instance one evident self-created
image of the Lord, in the opening chapters of Ezekiel, is the chariot,
with four faces set in different directions, of lion, eagle, ox and
man – above which was the throne of heaven. This was told to the
prophet so that it comes close to the image of Auriga the charioteer,
also called extensively ‘lord of hosts’ but in Kiswahili (or is it
from the original Greek) it is more emphatic, as ‘lord of armies.’ It
easily implies that world history, the art of empire building, came
from the Lord, initiating taming horses, for military purposes.
Even sustenance of human life and changing modes of life has had to do
with technological shifts, for instance the discovery or introduction
of maize largely facilitated colonial conquests and rule, because
native peoples no longer had to retain the necessary environment and
ecology to conduct traditional farming. Aristotle once said that
slavery would be brought to an end when there would be no need for
someone to lead oxen pulling ploughs or donkeys carrying loads – and
in modern African conditions, when everyone can afford motorized
transport, carts and pushers would be replaced in urban centres.
That’s not slavery, one may remind Aristotle…
As it is clear from the last example, technological determinism is a
bit haphazard, but is also reflects a truism, that when certain
conditions of production prevail, particular social relations are also
likely. It is thus one thing for someone to hire a laborer to carry a
load through a patch and then take cheaper motorized transport for
longer distances, or a cart is pushed up to home, avoiding more
expensive motorized transport like a taxi or pickup. But when all the
distance would be covered by laborers, chances of paying them by wage
negotiation as with current cart pushers are diminished, and natives
will be hunted to use as slaves.
That is why it is important to come to non-categorized problems of
technology, for instance the technology of state, in the sense of the
difference between self-reliant states where rulers can do pretty well
whatever they want, and where there is a possibility of
accountability. Dr Kwame Nkrumah, whom no one will accuse of being a
‘lackey of imperialism,’ made an important observation in introduction
remarks to ‘Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism,’ making
really what amounted to wishful thinking about accountability of the
colonial governor during the colonial period. It was now lacking;
people are massacred and no questions arise.
In that case it is possible that the students who demonstrated in
October 1966 weren’t nearly as offensive about Mwalimu as they were
markedly animated by what Dr Nkrumah had said, namely the idea that
there was accountability under colonialism, now lacking. This level of
realism was to put African self-consciousness on the gallows, for the
whole rationale of fighting colonialism was that imperial rule was but
a ghastly story of injustice – and it had taken seven years or so of
Ghanaian independence for this thesis to come unstuck, and by 1965 Dr
Nkrumah was publishing the thesis. From 1965 to 2010, it is clear Dr
Nkrumah was largely right.
As it is with Marx, that there are intensely contradictory trends of
political or strategic intuition that arise from his thinking, so it
is with Dr Nkrumah, such that the New Left, fellow travelers with
Prof. Joseph Stiglitz and John Perkins, see in Dr Nkrumah the thesis
on ‘the last stage of imperialism. They see ‘economic hit men’ as the
cause of troubles plaguing African countries, and guerrilla movements
in this or that area as resistance to this situation, despite that no
overall thesis arises. At present world radical forces are converging,
or rather said to be converging, for action to oppose the US first on
Iran, and not to use Boko Haram war to intervene in Nigeria, which
hence says let Boko Haram do whatever it may, if the price is to
accept US Africa Command. Isn’t Moreno Ocampo the hit man of good
governance?
The thesis of John Perkins, ‘Confessions of an economic hit-man’ is
now the standard image of what western imperialism means in developing
countries, such that what the World Bank projects is the devastation
of traditional society and maiming of the social fabric. It is akin to
what Frantz Fanon said, that ‘the coming of the settler has meant the
petrifaction of the native. For the native, life can only begin again
on the rotting corpse of the settler,’ In that case many among the New
Left, like the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, and not too few among
the Tahrir Square demonstrators and others, see life as starting again
at the ‘rotting corpses of IMF-World Bank hit men.’ Yet the collapse
of the Greek economy, crisis of the euro, tells a totally different
story.
What the New Left doesn’t want to admit is that unlike what it
espouses, namely that it is capitalism that is collapsing either in
the United States, Ireland, Greece or for that matter Tanzania, it is
really the opposite that is happening, namely plenty of ‘walls’ are
collapsing. It is the story that Marx enunciated in The Manifesto of
the Communist Party, that ‘cheap commodities are the heavy artillery
with which the bourgeoisie batters down all Chinese walls,’ to which
could add Berlin Walls, and even if such walls form a street, as in
New York. The point is that the world wanted a safe zone of limitless
exports, leaving own production systems nationalized.
While the New Left will in the not so far future discover or otherwise
accept that the solution to troubles in world economy is to slit open
the throat of public property around the world so that the eagles of
finance capital eat them up, so it is with African governance. So far
the IMF and the European Central Bank via Chancellor Angela Merkel and
President Nicolas Sarkozy are trying to generalize responsibility for
crisis among them, and asking the Greeks to reciprocate. Yet the
slogan of ‘cut, cut’ is reaching a dead end, whereas the proper slogan
should be ‘sell, sell’ as there is still plenty of public property
that could draw billions of dollars.
In terms of the Gospel, the current policy taken up by IMF and
European chancelleries is akin to finding out what Caesar can do,
whereas that isn’t the issue but what each person can do, that is,
draw out personal savings of billionaires into the matter. But it
means that the state (the gods of each nation, their version of
Mithra) abandon custody of property and accept that anyone with
savings can purchase them, hence liquidate the debt, not share it
around while leaving public property in place. Similarly, Africa is
now a more governable place because it is no longer cutting on
political violence, but selling its violent leaders to The Hague, for
trial.
Only by reaching this acme of imperialism, where African governance is
judged at The Hague (itself a city of Canaan, for (the) ’hague’ is
akin to haki, the Swahili word for justice), is the right technology
for conducting of polls finally discovered. No amount of criticism of
Africa’s big men would bring them to accept free and fair polls, but
with lords Charles Taylor, Jean-Pierre Bemba, and now Uhuru Kenyatta
and William Ruto committed for trial, ‘accountability can only rise up
again on the rotting corpse of African sovereignty,’ that is adored by
the New Left. Moreno Ocampo is the modern day Prometheus, creating the
court, a modernised image of Hell.
It would be quite interesting to see how radicalism or the New Left
periodises current changes in Africa especially moving into multiparty
democracy without bringing about the factor of The Hague, where the
old Solomon wisdom, or perhaps of David, that ‘the fear of God is the
beginning of wisdom’ works wonders. Only when African leaders fear The
Hague, when imperialism has a prosecutor general for the dominions,
which the New Left could rightly miss-spell as ‘do-minions’ as the
force above them; thus they must avoid to trespass. And in the final
analysis the court to try faulty and violent politics isn’t different
from the other court, this time located in what Mwalimu had to condemn
as an ‘International Ministry of Finance,’ to set right what is not
going right. African leaders, like the New Left, will let everything
crumble to the ground, like Tanzania’s railway system or the vast plot
and enterprise at Urafiki, so long as it isn’t given to
‘imperialists,’ or Boers. This was the profound sentiment animating
Greek socialism, and even Charles de Gaulle, imperial French ruler of
the 1960s, avidly lent his conservative voice to a rabid
anti-Americanism; it has but a few months to live. In that case, what
unites Greek socialism and French Gaullism is hatred of America, their
common Mithraism.
* mtasseni13@gmail.com
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