Tahir: 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: That's a dishonest start. You argue with Leninists all the time on these lists, and you don't "have" do it now. You want to.
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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: Actually, I was thinking of genocide as defined as racist, and agreeing with Grant Lee that they also involve class struggles. Since the UN definition of genocide does include killing members of an ethnic group as members of an ethnic group ( not only race), I agree with you. However, the point of what I was saying was not to establish that all genocides are racist ( which I was sort of thinking of as tautological), but to agree with Grant Lee that they are also class struggles.
In other words, you are refuting a point that I wasn't trying to make.
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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).
^^^^^^^ CB: I think we are going to have a logic class around here.
I said "... 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." You, Tahir, seem to think that you refute that statement by giving what you say is a specific examples of anti-colonialist struggles that don't have Marxists in them (until late). Even if it were true that Marxist inside the ANC didn't play a main role in the success there ( which is not true), there would still be the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union playing critical example and supportive roles. That is the main thing I had in mind.
But anyway, assume for argument there was no Marxist impact on the S. African independence movement. The above statement I make would still be true if Marxism was important in anti-colonialist successes, other than in South Africa.
But it is not true that the SU didn't play an important role in S. African liberation. Not only that, the victories of colonialist revolutions were objectively good for the workers in the capitalists countries, which is another way they were succeess "for" Marxism.
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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.
^^^^^^ CB: Nyrere was helped to come to power by a world in which there had been a Russian Revolution and a Soviet Union, and by a Ghanaian revolution led by Nkrumah, a Marxist. See above.
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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.
^^^^ CB: Other Africans have given me a different take than yours on the reputations of these movements in Africa. Your opinion on the impact of these movements is not the only one.
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.
^^^^^^ CB: Without conceding your claims here, I didn't say that every national liberation movement around the world was without crimes or mistakes. I said there were successes around the world and that Marxism played an important role in those successes, especially through the example and support of the SU. Your refutations are logically flawed in relation to what I said.
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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.
^^^^^ CB: Yes, another example. Cuba , which itself was supported by the SU as a anti-colonialist revolution, then supported other colonialist rev. You make my point in more detail for me. China helped Korea too.
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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: I have better logic than you. You need to look at an elementary logic or grammar book.
Yes, I know quite a bit about Marxism in Africa. Your logical confusion makes you miss the impacts of Marxism on Africa that I describe above. And then your claim that African Marxists played no important role in colonialist struggles there is inaccurate.
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.
CB: Your statement is pretty bland and trite too, not to mention a gratuitous and fake "move" , since anybody can go through what others write, lift a sentence out of context and call it "bland" or "trite". And more, who says every word uttered in political analysis is supposed to be "exciting" and "profound".
You act like you are about 18 years old. ..................
... 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?
CB: Try google. He's buried in Ghana.
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