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 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". 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 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 into extrapolating here that
MOJA-G wasjust 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.
One would have thought that 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; MOJA-G would have
joined the fray and condemn this gov't as a tyranny. 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 thewar Gambians have declared against him. Just as you have the
absolute imperative of deeming to 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 "Africahas
perhaps the most heterogeneous collection of human communities" [your own
very words]. Since you haven't kneaded or made any attempt 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
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 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. 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 in 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 falsfication. 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 incoherent 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 societiesMoa's, Castro's, Ho Chi-Minh and even the Bolshevik
s revolutions were peasant dominated andf not based on the "industrial
proletariat" as Marxism theorised.
Virtually all that Marx had claimed 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 is it's monist outlook. Because it is
a monist philosophy, it is susceptible to dictatorial and fanatical
proclivities. Indeed it makes claims to such orders like "dictatorship of
the proletariat", and as such a truly Marxist hardly augurs well for an
inherently heterogeneous society. 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 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.
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