Dear Mr Manjang,
To be brutally honest with you, i found your last mail to be both disingenuous and ingenuous. Disingenuous, with Sarjo Jallow's shameful complicity in the making of the evil in the Gambia, you chose to absolve him despite the preponderance of evidence that he is in this together with Jammeh and his thugs. Ingenuous, because unlike many professing Pan African Marxists, you chose to be frank and admitted that Marxism at any rate, in Africa was a bumbling mis-adventure. In this mail, i should like to deal with both strands of thought for i think they deserve our attention and indeed, there is a corollary which fittingly should help explain something of what you aptly called in your mail as the "African Condition".
Either you were engaging Gambia-L in semantic sophistry or relativist games but your declaration of "trust and confidence in SOS Sarjo Jallow's sincerity and personal integrity" is very disingenuous. By this declaration, you are tacitly sanctioning his continued participation in a regime that has defied all human benevolence in its acts of repression against the Gambian people. This is a regime that in broad day-light shot at point blank with live ammunition, school children and a kid as young as three in defiance of all perceptions of civility. A regime notorious for its murders, abductions and terrorising of innocent civilians since the first day it usurped power from the Gambian people. Without any signs of remorse after the brutalities of April 10 and 11, it is still repressing, terrorising and threatening Gambians with "six feet deep". A gov't that engages in day-light robbery of our State coffers, money laundering other vices you would have best left with the New York Mafiosi. Yet, in the face of these incriminating evidences, your friend Sarjo still serves [without resigning] as the official mouth piece of such a gov't, peddling endless lies and supplying intellectual muscle to a nonsense crack-pot like Jammeh and you still wheeze with all honesty that Sarjo is "sincere" and still having "personal integrity"? I suppose relativism has suddenly dented the meanings of "sincerity" and "integrity". Some "integrity" and "sincerity". You want people with "personal integrity" and "sincerity", go have a quiet word with Pa Sallah Jagne who upon realising how crack-pot Jammeh is, placed his pen down and called it quits. If Sarjo Jallow or another intellectual prostitute in the Jammeh gov't want us to believe their "sincerity" and "personal integrity", they should have all thrown their pens in Jammeh's face after April 10 and 11. Yet they have stuck with him through thick and thin supplying intellectual muscle to the most brutal crack-pot regime in Africa. Yet, you of all people wish us to believe you are sincere with your declaration that Jallow still has "sincerity " and "personal integrity"? This, after your comrade Dumo Sarho had been abducted and still locked up for conniving in an imaginary putsch against the State? Her poor forlorn wife running up and down the country trying to seek his release but to no avail? Were these what you MOJA-G people were opposing during the Jawara days? Is this your interpretation of social justice and liberty? One would be excused for extrapolating here that MOJA-G was just against the establishment then because it wasn't favourable to their selfish interests and when they had their opportunity didn't hesitate to join a more repressive regime than Jawara's.
Frankly, one would have thought that an unrepentant, immoral, illegal, brutal and crack-pot Fascist regime like the APRC which has literally engaged in all that MOJA-G claimed it abhorrs: From daylight robbery of gov't coffers to the murder, maiming and terrorising of innocent Gambians; would have spurred MOJA-G to join the fray and condemn this gov't as a tyranny. Where is MOJA-G activism in the wake of all these barbarity and when a colleague is illegally incarcerated as a prisoner of conscience? Yet, we have you, Mr. Ousman Manjang, a former Spokesman for MOJA-G, making soft and low risk criticisms of this barbaric regime. Calling a comrade of yours who is another intellectual prostitute to this regime as "sincere" and having "personal integrity" is an insult to the suffering Gambian people. Put bluntly, Sarjo Jallow is another intellectual prostitute and have sold his soul to the devil of Kaninlai. Put bluntly, MOJA-G is part of the establishment. An establishment unrivalled in the annals of Gambian history as barbaric, repressive and totalitarian.
I want to believe you are honest and do share our sense of justice. If you are still for liberty and social justice, then you owe it to yourself, the Gambian people and humanity in general to disavow your endorsement of Sarjo Jallow and join the fray against the tyrannous evil that Jammeh really is. Or you can still maintain your disingenuous stance of fence-sitting and drool about Sarjo's imagined "sincerity" and "personal integrity". The choice ultimately will be yours. It will be a choice us in the opposition will respect. The point has to be made though that by endorsing Jallow's "personal integrity" and "sincerity", you are by extension endorsing the repressive, brutal and crack-pot gov't he whores his intellect to. I will repeat to you that we have reached a point in the struggle where no-one can have it both ways. Either you are with Jammeh or you are against him and join in the war Gambians have declared against him. Just as you have the absolute imperative of deeming see fit where you belong, so do we have every right of interpreting such choice. And do please excuse my bluntness. I feel i need to take this off my chest.
On the discourse on Marxism and Africa, i found you to be interesting, sophisticated, enlightened and ingenuous. From your mail, it seems we have two common grounds of understanding: the scurrying colonialists' abject mishandling of the newly created African States and the fact that "Africa has perhaps the most heterogeneous collection of human communities" [your own very words]. Since you haven't kneaded or made any attempts to delineate how Marxism fits into the "African Condition", i think it will be more proper here to start the ball rolling by stating the case why i believe Marxism is a menace and wrong for the "African Condition". I shall trace the core of Marxism and then pinpoint its incoherency or pretensions or quackery.
Marxism, and by Marxism, i shall refer to it here stripped off all supplantations, additives and twists that followers had done to his work to suit their purposes, prejudices and conditions. Suffice to say that there was or is hardly anything new in Marxism save it's stitching together of Germanic philosophical idealism in the tradition of Hegel, French Romantic and radical revolutionary politics and English empirical economics in the tradition Ricardian economics. Marx didn't stop there. Being the genuis he is, he craftily observed the developments and indeed, the revolutions that the Scientific realm had been experiencing especially Newtonian physics which had gravity and later Natural Laws. He pinched from Newton, his ideas of Natural Laws and sprinkled it on his largely inchoate philosophy which was developing then. It must be noted here that there were already precursors to Marx especially on socialist theory some of whom were his contemporaries, who were more lucid and brilliant than him on that score. I'm talking of Proudhon, Fourier, Bakunin, et al. And his contempt for these men is legendary.
His views on "the formal relationship between elements of which human history consists" or historical structuring were fundamentally Hegelian. His views that "the development of economic relationships is the determining factor in history" were Saint Simonian. Most of what he propounded on Socialism had fore-runners like Fourier, Saint Simon, Proudhon, Bakunin, et al. His views on class warfare as it relates to economics had already been expounded and developed by the Swiss economist Sismondi. On Economics, especially industrial economics, Marx was largely a half-charlatan taught by Engels who had practical training from his family's cotton mill in Manchester in Lancashire. Most of the stuff he had to say later or "contribute" to wages and prices in economics were largely Ricardian whom he studied without any tutoring from professional economists. And it's important to add here that Marx was trained as a philosopher not some social-scientist as many perceive him to be.
The only novelty and indeed, ingenuity in Marxism, is the incorporation of all these corpora of his precursors into a single corpus seemingly applying scientific laws and or methodology to argue and verify his case as Newton and other professional scientists were then doing. This is where the genuis of Marx lied: Stitching together such disparate corpus of thought and for the first time attempting to buffer them with scientific laws to make them look scientific. So we sum up here that the core of what constitutes Marxism is a conflation of Continental [Hegelian idealism], Romantic and radical revolutionary politics [the type associated with Paris Cafes and Salons] and English empirical economics in the tradition of Ricardo. Then on this conflation, he sprinkled Newtonian Natural Laws. In short he created what was to be later labelled "scientific socialism" or the first attempt to make Socialism scientific and strip it of it's drooling Utopian outlooks.
Since Marxism lays claims to scientificity and seemingly does, to examine the profundity or quackery in this, it is essential we take a closer at it's claims as having Scientific Laws. When one however, takes a hard-nosed scrutiny of "scientific socialism" or Marxism, one sees how Marx like the half-charlatan he was in the natual sciences, crudely misapplied Newtonian Natural Laws which states explicitly that: Between specified condition and specified phenomena, we are in a position to predict the future of the state of nature of say, moments of tides, sunrise and sunset, eclipses, etc, etc. It is this Law that Marx misinterpreted and supposed could be applicable to disciplines like history, philosophy, politics and economics. That like tides and eclipses, he can now predict the future of history. What Karl Poppper, [perhaps the most passionate and vigourous intellectual refuter of Marxism], would later describe as "historicism". In fact in Das Capital, Marx claimed he had discovered "the Natural Lawsof Capitalist production" or "the iron Laws of capitalism". In laying bare the incoherency of these claims, Popper subjected Marxism's scientific claims to what has now become known as "the crucial Popperian test" - verification and falsification. Popper argued that the key centrality in the Marxist programme, that theoretical history/historicism corresponds to theoretical physics, falls flat on it's face, "because ordinary predictions in Science [theoretical physics] are conditional; they assert that certain changes will be accompanied by other changes." In essence theoretical history/historicism, "unlike proper scientific hypothesis cannot either proved or falsified." Popper went on further to posit that since "Marxism's 'iron laws of capitalist development' are no more than unconditional historical prophecies, as vague and slippery as the quatrains of Nostradamus", it's claims to scientific laws are as legit as some crack-pot cult leader prophesying the end of the world. That is the ultimate insult.
Another incoherency associated with Marxism is it's theory that "only fully developed Capitalist countries could go communist" and therefore all societies have to complete the Capitalist stages of development first. Well, as you and i know, history had decisively repudiated that theory. All countries that had gone communist have been largely peasant or pre-industrial societies. Moa's, Castro's, Ho Chi-Minh's and even the Bolshevik revolutions were peasant dominated and not based on the "industrial proletariat" as Marxism theorised or predicted.
Virtually all that Marx had claimed, theorised or predicted had been decisively repudiated by posterity. From it's quack theories on Matter [which post-Einsteinian physics dealt with] to it's understanding of individual behaviours [debunked by post-Freudians] to it's economic foundations [by post-Keynesians], Marxism has been rendered absolete. It's spurrious claims on the shrinking of classes into just two: The over-powerful Capitalist minority and ever- growing and hungry working class/proletariat majority had been repudiated by the fact that in all developed capiutalist societies, the working classes are disappearing/developing into Lower-Middle and Middle classes. Class structures and social mobility contrary to Marxist claims have changed for the better. Political parties which were launched on the basis of this Marxist calculation on class structures and social mobility, like British Labour Party, have had to soul-search and re-invent themselves or face extinction. Perhaps, the biggest folly of Marxism is it's mis-calculation and underestimation of capitalism's ability to re-invent itself and it's atavistic instincts of survive-ability. It's erratic and untidy nature which Marxism scorned, are all part of the human experience and indeed, persona. Capitalism tamed is all human.
Yet, my principal objection to Marxism, especially it's presence in Africa, is it's monist outlook. Because it is a monist philosophy, it is susceptible to dictatorial and fanatical proclivities and wholly intolerant to opposing viewpoints. Indeed it lays claims to such political orders like "dictatorship of the proletariat", and as such a truly Marxist polity would NOT augur well for or in fact IS NOT compatible to an inherently heterogeneous society like Africa. The question then becomes how can a monist philosophy like Marxism reconcile the inherent differences of what you aptly called "perhaps the most heterogeneous collection of human communities" that is Africa? What relevance does a decisively repudiated quackery like Marxism have for a 21st. Century Africa? This is a question militant anti-Marxists like me are dying to see get answered.
Sincerely,
Hamjatta Kanteh
PS: I hope we avoid too much technicalities of Marxism so we can draw in others who might share our interest.
Hamjatta Kanteh
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Get your free e-mail account with *unlimited* storage at http://www.ftnetwork.com
Visit the web site of the Financial Times at http://www.ft.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
