I don't enter into these exchanges with the list's M-L proponents without misgivings, but this post is so spectacularly wrong that I feel I have to do so again. See below. Tahir
CB: I'd go so far as to say that every genocide has been both racist and motivated by surplus extraction/resource extraction. So, the fact that imperialist exploitation is a motive for an atrocity inflicted on large groups of people does not foreclose that it is at the same time racist and genocidal. In the case of Iraq , it is both.
Tahir: Not true; there have been genocides in Africa that have only been very obliquely related to racism. The biggest of these in recent years was in Rwanda. The slaughter there occurred largely as a result of hatreds between two African ethnic groups.
CB: Here's an update on Marx: See Lenin,et al., right up to Fidel Castro on colonialism, national liberation and self-determination. The main victory of humanity in the 20th Century was in successful anti-racist, anti-colonialist , anti-imperial/international capital struggles. This has been the main success of Marxism, period.
Tahir: Now this is where there is just no basis for agreement. I think that the above opinion is based on a large degree of ignorance and not a little wishful thinking. The anti-colonial struggles of Africa, owe very little to Marxism. In South Africa the African National Congress was formed in 1912, shortly after the failure of the Zulu uprising (1908). There was no presence of communists in either of these two events. The ANC only aligned itself with the SACP for the first time several decades later, although, following a visit by Bunting and other SACP members to Moscow in the late 1920s, where they were instructed on the 'correct' position to take by one Bukharin (the 'black republic thesis'), the SACP began to throw some of its meagre weight behind the nationalist movement. The PAC on the other hand split with the ANC in the 1950s, precisely over the decision to admit a few whites and communists into the movement. The ultra-nationalist PAC stayed rabidly anti-communist thereafter despite the emergence of a Maoist faction within it (some members of which met unpleasant fates at the hands of their 'comrades' I believe).
Then if one looks further afield in Africa, very few of the anti-colonial movements had a significant Marxist component, and where these did emerge, they were often dealt with harshly, for example the late Maoist and first foreign minister of Tanzania, A.M. Babu, was thrown into prison by Nyrere for a number of years for his views - I got this information from a long personal conversation with Babu in Cape Town about a decade ago.
Where ostensibly 'Marxist' movements came into power, e.g. Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mocambique, etc. these were brutal and selfserving enough, or else simply incompetent enough, to tarnish severely the reputation of Marxism in Africa, a situation that is still going to take a long time to turn around. Then we also have the unedifying spectacle of the SU and China backing opposing nationalist factions, each one trying to outdo the other in their support for these alternative nationalist movements, often with very little that was progressive to recommend them - bloodbaths and utter social retrogression followed. I don't know whose record was worse, but I suspect it was China's, through support for such monstrosities as Mobutu Seso Seko and Jonas Savimbi. In Zimbabwe the SU and China supported ZAPU and ZANU respectively. Well, on the eve of liberation they formed the Patriotic Front and a government supposedly based on this, and within three years Mugabe unleashed his famous North Korean trained brigade onto the supporters of Zapu in a little gencidal operation that forced Nkomo to disband his party and left Mugabe in undisputed power. Today Mugabe is presiding over a second genocide - 7 million (more than half of Zimbabwe's population) are now facing starvation.
It is really all too horrible for words. Marxism-Leninism, Stalin's very own little invention, has been nothing but a failure in Africa, with only very occasional glimpses of something better: I can only think of two of these off the top of my head: The defeat handed to South Africa in Angola by combined Cuban and Angolan forces (which is why Cuba at least still enjoys some prestige amongst black S. Africans), and some of the fairly decent writings of Amilcar Cabral.
Do you have any information that I don't have, or is your argument just based on 'racial identification'? Do you know anything about marxism in Africa at all?
CB: These were and are class struggles.
Tahir: A bland and trite formulation of the same order as, er, "social facts are things" or something. ..................
... Marx and Engels focussed your attention on the unity of the world working class -Workers of the World , Unite !- The main division of the world working class in world history and still is due to racism. The struggle against racism is the central struggle of the communist movement. After that great Marxist, W.E.B. Dubois, we can say the question of the colorline is the main one of the 20th Century, and now remains for the 21st,unfortunately.
Tahir: I didn't know that Dubois was even a marxist of any sort. What sort?