Africa: Politics, Economy, Ideology is a compact statement of a doctrine. Akhmed Iskenderov surveys the whole of newly independent Africa — its politics, its economies, its warring ideologies — but the survey is organised throughout by a single thesis, the one this part of the series exists to examine: that the backward, largely peasant states thrown up by decolonisation could cross over to socialism without passing through capitalism, led not by a working class but by "revolutionary democrats," and underwritten by the Soviet Union. Where the drafted Ulyanovsky volume, Present-Day Problems in Asia and Africa, argues that doctrine whole and in the abstract, and where Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution and USSR and Countries of Africa apply it to particular states, this book is the "Africa in general" version: the theory laid over an entire continent at once, in the confident register of a state setting out its official line. It is a Progress Publishers title — the imprint on the copyright page reads "© Progress Publishers 1972," and the one appearance of Novosti in the book is a footnote citing the Twenty-Fourth Congress report, not a rival publisher. This is not one of the volumes in this series misfiled under Progress; it is the real thing.
The date needs no detective work. The catalogue says 1972 and the book reads as a book of 1971–72: its horizon event is the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU "held in the spring of 1971," which it treats as the freshest word on the national-liberation movement; Nasser appears as "the late President" (he died in September 1970); the Portuguese-backed raid on Conakry of late 1970 is "the outright aggression against Guinea in the autumn." There is no translation lag to argue about and no earlier edition standing behind it. What was available to the author is what was available in 1971, and the absence list, where one is drawn, has to be built from that year — not from what the 1970s and 1980s would go on to reveal about the states he was describing. Those later events belong to the verdict, not to the silences, and they are taken up as such below.
Iskenderov is best characterised from the book itself, because that is all it is safe to characterise him from. He is a serious Africanist. He has command of the Soviet Orientalist literature — Potekhin, Solodovnikov, the multi-volume institute surveys of classes and the national question — and, less commonly for the genre, he reads the other side in the original: Nyerere's Essays on Socialism, Tom Mboya, the Kenyan planning paper, Father Bede Onuoha's Elements of African Socialism, Brian Crozier, Hans Morgenthau, Thomas Hodgkin. He argues with these texts rather than merely denouncing them, and the book is the better for it. It is a work of scholarship in the service of a policy, and both halves of that description matter.
The theory is stated most cleanly where Iskenderov sorts the continent. The newly independent African countries, he writes, "can be divided into two groups — the socialist-oriented states taking the non-capitalist path of development, and the capitalist-oriented states seeking to adapt the forms and methods of capitalist development and bourgeois democracy to their national conditions." The first group is the book's cause. Its states have officially proclaimed socialism their aim, and some — "the Arab Republic of Egypt, Algeria, Guinea, the People's Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Libya and Somalia" — "are carrying out progressive socio-economic measures which are paving the way for their future advance to socialism." The whole book is a brief for the proposition, which it credits to Lenin, "that the nations breaking out of colonial bondage in our day can take the path of social progress without going through the capitalist stage."
The decisive question, on Iskenderov's own account, is one of leadership, and here he is admirably candid about what his theory requires. In these countries there is barely a proletariat to lead anything: the working class is marked by "numerical weakness," is "semi-proletarian," keeps "close ties with land and their small farms," and in most states no proletarian party exists at all. The revolution is therefore led by others. "A number of newly-free countries are ruled by revolutionary democratic parties," he writes, and the task before them is not proletarian rule but the construction of "a broad, flexible and solid political popular front" — "a single national democratic front" — uniting all the anti-imperialist classes, the "non-proletarian strata, including bourgeois elements," for the long haul. This front "is not a tactical task of a temporary nature. It is a long-term historical problem." And the class that classical Marxism made the agent of socialist revolution is explicitly relieved of the job, at least for now: "none of the present-day social classes and political parties is in a position to direct single-handedly" the transition, the national bourgeoisie because it is unreliable, and the proletariat because, "being young," it "is as yet incapable of playing the role of hegemonic force in the national liberation revolution."
From this Iskenderov draws the conclusion that gives the doctrine its shape and its vulnerability. "What especially distinguishes the revolutionary movement in Africa," he writes, "is that the national liberation revolution may begin growing into a socialist revolution long before the working class has assumed the leadership of the socialist movement." And the crossing may be gentle. For the states already on the non-capitalist path, "their transition to socialism — in the absence of outside intervention — may assume peaceful forms and come about through the evolution of the ideological and political views of the non-proletarian forces now heading the revolutionary movement, through their adoption of scientific socialism." A stratum that is not the working class, standing in for a working class that scarcely exists, is to evolve a peasant nation into socialism from above — peacefully, by adopting the right ideas, with Soviet aid and the Soviet model before its eyes. That is the doctrine, and Iskenderov deserves the credit of having stated it without evasion.
The book's sharpest and most useful chapters are the ones that police the border of the doctrine — that separate the "socialist orientation" Moscow endorsed from the "African socialism" it did not. This distinction was central to the Soviet line, and Iskenderov works it hard. The African socialism of the Senegalese and Kenyan schools, he argues, is a fraud dressed as an inheritance: it "is apt to regard it as a doctrine designed to substantiate the possibility of a 'third road' somewhere between capitalism and scientific socialism," a road that turns out on inspection to run straight back into "the bourgeois-reformist concepts of socialism that are widely current in the capitalist West." Its appeal to a classless African past — everybody a worker, the elder a mere guardian of communal wealth, no exploitation of man by man — is a device for denying that class struggle exists at all, and thus for leaving property in place. He is scathing about where it ends up: "'African socialism' is rather a system of an oligarchic nature set up by a handful of privileged people who are concerned more about their own well-being than about the needs of the working masses," which is "perhaps" why "the masses are, as a rule, indifferent" to it. Senghor's version, he notes with some satisfaction, "meet[s] with no support in Africa."
There is real analytic force here, and a reader should say so. The Kenyan sessional paper Iskenderov dissects genuinely did use the language of "African socialism" to justify foreign investment, the encouragement of "national capital," and abstention from nationalisation lest it "discourage additional private investment" — and it genuinely did rest on the claim that "the sharp class divisions that once existed in Europe have no place in African socialism and no parallel in African society." Iskenderov's charge that this was capitalism with a communal veneer was not wrong. It is a good piece of ideological criticism, and it is worth reading on its own terms.
But it is also the seam where the doctrine's method shows. The test Iskenderov applies to African socialism — does the ruling stratum use socialist language to entrench its own privileges while the masses stay passive and property survives? — is a test he never turns on the states he approves. He is even ambivalent about Nyerere, whose ujamaa rests on exactly the communal-past argument he elsewhere demolishes, praising the Arusha Declaration's "sober approach" in one breath while filing Tanzania among the progressive states in the next. And of the national bourgeoisie in his favoured countries he writes that its ideologues are "trying to implant the kind of 'national socialism' that would camouflage the bourgeois nature of their countries' development" — the identical operation he has just convicted African socialism of, now conceded to be at work inside the socialist-oriented camp. The category cuts one way. Where the label is "African socialism," the gap between socialist rhetoric and bourgeois content is the whole indictment. Where the label is "socialist orientation," the same gap is a transitional difficulty to be worked through with Soviet help.
Iskenderov's doctrine is not new, and neither is the objection to it. The "single national democratic front" governing a peasant nation through an intermediate, neither-bourgeois-nor-proletarian stage is the lineal heir of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" that the Communist International prescribed for the colonial East in the 1920s — and it is precisely the construction that Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution (1930) was written to refute. The refutation was in print more than forty years before this book, and it reads as though addressed to it.
Its second thesis states the colonial case directly: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." The quarrel is not over whether Africa's peasant nations could be liberated; Trotsky insisted, as Iskenderov does, that the peasantry is decisive and that these tasks are revolutionary. The quarrel is over the substitute. Can a stratum that is not the working class — the "revolutionary democrats," the progressive officers, the national-democratic party — stand in for a working class that barely exists and administer socialism into being from above? Trotsky's answer was that the intermediate formation Iskenderov's whole argument rests on does not hold: "the peasant follows either the worker or the bourgeois," and "between Kerenskyism and the Bolshevik power, between the Kuomintang and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is not and cannot be any intermediate stage, that is, no democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants." A "national-democratic" bloc that suspends the class question in a permanent middle is, on this view, a fiction that will resolve under pressure toward one pole or the other. And the leadership question is settled the opposite way from Iskenderov: "the realization of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletariat vanguard, organized in the Communist Party." A revolution that "may begin growing into a socialist revolution long before the working class has assumed the leadership" is, in these terms, not an African peculiarity but a contradiction in terms.
There is an irony in Iskenderov's own proof texts. To license the peaceful, various roads to socialism he quotes Lenin: all nations "will arrive at socialism — this is inevitable, but all will do so in not exactly the same way, each will contribute something of its own to some form of democracy, to some variety of the dictatorship of the proletariat." But Lenin's pluralism, in the very words Iskenderov reproduces, still runs through "the dictatorship of the proletariat" — the thing Iskenderov's doctrine is built to do without. The quotation grants variety in the form of a destination whose substance the book has quietly discarded.
The deeper failing is one of form, and it is the discriminating test this series has learned to apply. Iskenderov's theory is arranged so that no event can disconfirm it. When a socialist-oriented state advances, the doctrine is vindicated; when a progressive regime falls, the fault lies elsewhere — with imperialism, or with the treachery of the national bourgeoisie, never with the theory that predicted the state's ascent. The book contains a perfect specimen. Discussing the overthrow of Nkrumah, it explains that "the imperialist monopolies sharply reduced the prices of cocoa beans and caused serious financial difficulties for the government of Ghana. After the military coup in this country, the cocoa prices were substantially raised." The coup that destroyed the doctrine's most celebrated African showcase is entered not as evidence against the road but as proof of imperialism's malice. Even the army, which Iskenderov concedes "can play a progressive role in the national liberation movement but can also easily become a tool of the reactionary forces," is a two-headed instrument in exactly the way the theory needs: when officers make a revolution he approves they are revolutionary democrats; when officers unmake it they are imperialism's tools. Success is the road working; failure is the road betrayed or subverted. There is no outcome the framework would accept as showing that a peasant nation cannot, in fact, be walked to socialism by a party that is not the workers' party. A theory that cannot lose is not being tested; it is being professed.
And the one systematic theory of the colonial revolution that contradicts his own is the one Iskenderov never engages. In a book that names and disputes Senghor, Nyerere, Mboya, Onuoha, Crozier and Morgenthau, the words "permanent revolution" do not appear, and neither does the name of Trotsky. The doctrine is stated as though its antithesis had never been formulated. An opponent who is quoted can be checked; an opponent who is not mentioned cannot even be found.
Iskenderov invites the harder test all the same, because he names his cases. His roll of socialist-oriented and progressive states — Egypt, Algeria, Guinea, the People's Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Somalia, Ghana and Mali among the older cases — is a list the following two decades went through almost name by name, and the record is close to unanimous.
Egypt, his leading model, was already turning as he wrote: within months of the book's appearance Sadat expelled the Soviet military advisers, and by the end of the decade Egypt had crossed to the American camp and to infitah. Ghana's Nkrumah had been gone since 1966, a fact the book records; Mali's Modibo Keïta had been overthrown in 1968. Guinea's Sékou Touré died in 1984 and the army seized power within days, opening the country to the market. Somalia's Siad Barre, whose "scientific socialism" Iskenderov counts as progressive, expelled his Soviet patrons in 1977, switched sides in the Ogaden war the doctrine could not explain, and presided over a state that collapsed into war and fragmentation by 1991. Tanzania's ujamaa, the villagisation the book admired, was abandoned as a costly failure and the country turned to market reform from the mid-1980s. Algeria backed away from its socialist course and descended, at the decade's end, into civil war. The People's Republic of the Congo — Marxist-Leninist in name from 1969 — formally renounced Marxism-Leninism in 1990–91 and turned to multiparty elections. Of the states on which Iskenderov rested his case, essentially none reached socialism. Most reversed to the market; several collapsed into coup, war, or state failure; the fortunes of their peoples ranged from stagnation to catastrophe.
This is not the cheap wisdom of hindsight. It is the specific prediction of the specific tradition Iskenderov declined to name. The reversals he could categorise only as imperialist subversion or bourgeois treachery were, on the permanent-revolution analysis, the foreseeable resolution of regimes that had suspended the class question in a middle that could not hold. What looked to him like a stage on the road to socialism looked to Trotsky's heirs like a petty-bourgeois or military-bureaucratic formation holding down, in the name of an absent working class, the very masses whose struggle had made the revolution — and that is much closer to what the record shows.
The heirs said so at the time. Africa in Struggle, a small mimeographed Trotskyist review of African liberation whose subtitle was "in the whirlwind of permanent revolution," set out in 1975 exactly the counter-thesis Iskenderov's book is built to exclude: that "the idea that there can be some progressive democratic (ie. non-socialist, and therefore capitalist) stage of revolution is false and utopian." "This is strikingly confirmed in Africa," it went on, "where none of the new post-colonial regimes has been able to develop the productive forces, unify the country, establish basic democratic rights, etc. Only a socialist revolution could achieve such ends." And it applied to the very slogan Iskenderov trades in the scepticism he reserves for African socialism: examining the states that laid "claim to a 'socialist orientation,'" it found nationalisations that left imperialism "considerably strengthened" and co-operatives that "collapsed after burying without trace the government grants which had financed them," the money "appropriated by those politically influential individuals" who ran them. The label was a claim to be tested against the class character of the state, not a stage to be taken on trust. That was the argument in print, from inside our own tradition, while Iskenderov's states were still being celebrated.
None of this touches the part of Iskenderov's commitment that was real, and a reader told the whole book is worthless would be misled. Its anti-colonial and anti-imperialist conviction is genuine and, on its own ground, right. The colonial empires were systems of plunder; Iskenderov's account of the era-by-era forms of that plunder — from "the open armed robbery" of primitive accumulation to the export of finance capital — is sound economic history. His central warning has aged better than much of the modernisation theory that opposed it: that formal independence without economic independence is a trap, that neo-colonialism works by tying the new states "to the world capitalist economy" and perpetuating "their unequal position in the system of the capitalist division of labour," and that finance capital is "capable of subjecting, and actually does subject, to itself even states enjoying the fullest political independence." His demolition of the attempt to rename neo-colonialism "interdependence," and to lump the Soviet Union together with the former colonial powers as equally answerable for African poverty, lands cleanly. On the question of who actually freed these countries — the peoples who fought, not the powers that withdrew — he is a useful corrective to a Western literature that too often treated decolonisation as a gift bestowed. And his ideological criticism of African socialism, whatever its double standard, is genuinely acute: the Kenyan and Senegalese schools really were, in large part, what he said they were.
The book is, in short, a capable Africanist's survey harnessed to a doctrine that the capable Africanist could not allow himself to doubt. Its scholarship on colonialism and dependency remains usable; its central thesis was refuted in advance by a tradition it would not name and disproved within twenty years by the fate of the states it praised.
The reply to this book is not a single passage but a body of work, and the reader should follow it into the sibling volumes and the reply corpus alike. Read Iskenderov's "Africa in general" statement of the non-capitalist path beside Ulyanovsky's Present-Day Problems in Asia and Africa, which argues the same doctrine whole, and beside its applications — Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution and USSR and Countries of Africa, where the theory meets the Horn and the record it cannot absorb. The common answer to all of them is The Permanent Revolution (1930), theses 2, 4, 5 and 6 above all, stated in Trotsky's terms before any of these African states existed. And the contemporaneous reply, reaching in the 1970s and on the evidence then available the class characterisation Iskenderov could not, is in Africa in Struggle — which put permanent revolution in its subtitle and turned it, case by case, on precisely the "socialist orientation" this book proclaims.