by Kodjo Asare

Marxism in the imperial core has inherited a specific way of thinking from Western academic scholarship. While this is especially the case with Western Marxism as an intellectual tradition—in which Marxism as a whole is reduced to philosophy and cultural critique, divorced totally from political economy or political practice—it is found even among supposed cadre organisations, regardless of if they are Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, or Maoist. This is perhaps not surprising, as university students have come to form something of a recruitment basis for many a Marxist organisation, not only in the imperial core but globally.

A major legacy of this inheritance has been to impose on the socialist movement an arbitrary divide—which, on a deeper level, may even be said to represent an expression of the mind-body debate—between those who are deemed to be the thinkers and those who are seen as the doers, between those who are regarded as men of action and those deemed to be men of ideas. Never shall the two meet or exist in a single person, it is thought.

The arbitrary separation of thinkers and doers has several consequences whose impact is far more severe than is typically assumed. Figures are either grouped under the category of the practical politician or the theorist, without any acknowledgement of the dynamic relationship which exists between both, without recognising that one can be both. Indeed, the overlap between the function of the practical political player and that of the theorist should enrich our understanding of a Marxist cadre; from a Marxist perspective, one needs both revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice, the two are not separate from one another.

Take the case of Antonio Gramsci. Marxists in the imperial core have transformed him into an academic who wrote in the abstract on cultural theory, as opposed to the active Marxist-Leninist political cadre he was in reality. Gramsci was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party and, as such, was very much the embodiment of a pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist, of the kind who would normally be termed a “Stalinist” (Gramsci led a pro-Moscow Comintern Party during the Stalin era).

But the practice of separating theoreticians from cadre not only impacts overtly political figures like Gramsci. Even György Lukács, who is typically regarded as the founder of Western Marxism and fits much more easily into the comfortable academic mould, was a member of a pro-Soviet Communist Party and resided in the USSR during the Stalin era.  In that sense, he was very far from the liberal “anti-authoritarian” Marxist he is often imagined to be.

This mischaracterisation is reproduced to an even greater degree with Third World Marxists and Pan-African socialists such as Frantz Fanon or Walter Rodney. In fact, the dualist dynamic applies even more clearly to Third World Marxists, in large part because it is so common for theorists of the Global South to receive very little attention from the start (reflect on how niche a figure like George Padmore is to Western Marxist circles, despite representing a major link between the early Comintern and the Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial movements).

The relationship between socialist movements of the imperial core and the periphery has always been a complicated one. With relatively few exceptions, Marxists and socialists of the Third World have typically been treated by Marxists in the West in the following three ways: they are either ignored entirely, dismissed as non-Marxist, or on some occasions are treated in a manner which idealises and fetishises their struggle. Rarely are they truly engaged with on their own terms, as people from whom Marxists of the imperial core have much to learn for developing both our own theory and own political practice.

The Trinidadian Marxist Pan-Africanist author C. L. R. James highlighted a major example of this in his book, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution:

Myth-making conceals yet another virulent poison for the myth-makers. It insists that they see themselves always as the givers, and Africans as the takers, themselves as teachers and Africans as the taught. In the thousands of reports, articles, speeches, that I have read about events in Ghana, I have never seen a single word, the slightest hint that anything which took place there could instruct or inspire the peoples of the advanced countries in their own management of their own affairs, and this is as true of friends of Ghana as of its enemies.¹

By highlighting the idea that the Third World has nothing to teach Marxists of the First World in their own struggles, and indeed terming it a form of myth-making, C. L. R. James underscores how hollow the professions of internationalism from Marxists in the imperial core can be.

This failure to engage seriously with Third World Marxism—which C. L. R. James highlighted in the context of Kwame Nkrumah and the revolutionary struggle in Ghana to overthrow colonialism and imperialism, and which set the nation onto the path of socialist construction, thereby leading Ghana to become the first African nation to acquire independence—has unfortunately remained a dominant feature of both theory and practice in Marxist circles in the West.

Other Third World Marxists have likewise documented the dismissiveness characteristic of imperial core socialism. Walter Rodney, for example, speaking of his experience with British Trotskyists and their attitude to Africa and the Third World, described what he termed “latent racism”: these Marxists would rarely be overtly racist, and yet their entire attitude towards the Third World was arrogant and dismissive. Thus, in a real sense, Africans and other peoples of the Third World were seen as incapable of being socialists.²

Recognising the dualist divide of man of ideas versus man of action is essential to understand why Nkrumah is typically viewed merely as a political leader, rather than as a theorist. On the flip side of the divide are other Pan-Africanist Marxists like Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, and Amílcar Cabral, who are typically treated as merely political theorists and whose broader careers as active and even leading political activists are disregarded. In the case of Rodney, Fanon, and even Cabral, the approach taken is the same as with Gramsci: they are entirely decontextualised and decoupled from the practical political activity in which they were involved and are viewed exclusively as intellectuals—an approach which serves to cheapen their scholarship by ignoring the important role activism played in their respective works.

Because Nkrumah is somebody who held state power, he is grouped in the camp of figures who are treated as representing political players alone, regardless of the contributions they made to political theory. This category includes figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, V. I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong, all of whom made major contributions to Marxist theory and had a broad and wide cultural impact. Despite this, they are treated primarily, if not almost exclusively, as political leaders, and the fact that they also wrote theory is almost entirely neglected—outside of specific circles and contexts—regardless of how valuable or important these writings are for intellectual history.

But while a chauvinist, dismissive and racist orientation to African and Black Marxists is common, it is not unique to them. Neither is the problem confined to the nations of the white Anglosphere which form the inner centre of the imperial core. Consider Ho Chi Minh’s report on the national and colonial questions presented at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International (June-July 1924). In this report, Ho Chi Minh criticised the chauvinist and colonialist attitudes which remained prevalent within Communist parties of the Imperial core, including the Communist Party of France, of which he himself was a founding member.³ For him, imperial core socialists engaged with the colonial question in only a half-hearted and insincere way. While this attitude, however negative, is perhaps understandable in the 1920s, it is unfortunately the case that such tendencies have remained common in the socialist movement in the imperial core since.

A good example of the dismissiveness towards Third World Marxism can be found in the work of Oxford Law Professor and neo-Kautskyist theoretician Mike Macnair. In Revolutionary Strategy, a work regarded as his magnum opus, Macnair dismisses the entirety of Third World Marxism, including Nkrumah himself, by placing Nkrumah on a par with figures such as Jerry Rawlings and Museveni:

The left internationally has seen many sometimes very radical/left-talking nationalist and Third-Worldist charismatic individual leaders come and go in the last half-century. Some have themselves turned ‘realist’, like Nkrumah, Museveni, Jerry Rawlings or the leaders of the South African ANC; some have been ousted and/or killed by ‘realists’ in their own nationalist movements, like Sukarno, Ben Bella or Thomas Sankara. ‘Official communists’, Maoists, and Trotskyists in the process of moving towards ‘official communist’ politics, have celebrated one and all as the next Castro; for none has the celebration been long lived. Given this background, it is understandable that despite the enthusiasm of a part of the left, the broader movement should effectively suspend judgment on Chavismo.⁴

The above quote by Macnair represents what is ultimately a typical example of the way imperial core socialists engage with Nkrumah and the other Third World Marxists. At no point would the reader gather even the slightest hint that Nkrumah was not only a man who possessed political power (itself an inexcusable crime for much of the socialist movement in the core), but also made major contributions to political theory.

Indeed, something that would greatly surprise the socialist movement of the imperial core is that Marxists of the Third World have also thought deeply about them, as the above passages by C. L. R. James and Walter Rodney serve to highlight. Socialists of the Third World have not only developed theory about their own projects—building often far more successful socialist movements than those of the core—but have also thought deeply about the socialist movement in the imperial core itself. A large reason for this is that the divide and distinction between Marxists of the imperial core and the Third World is much narrower than is typically assumed to be the case, especially because many Third World Marxist leaders received their first exposure to Marxism in the imperial core. This was in large part because importing Marxist literature to the colonies was banned; the imperialists themselves very much feared the possible impact of Marxist theory on the colonial subjects.

The point is not to say that Marxists of the imperial core have nothing to teach Third World Marxists; rather, the spirit of true internationalism requires the existence of a two-way intellectual dialogue between Marxists of the core and the Third World. Developing a familiarity with, and an understanding of, what Third World Marxists’ perception of socialism in the imperial core was will allow us to truly enrich our understanding of our own movement. It will also allow us to deepen our theoretical insights on socialism from a truly internationalist perspective. By drawing from socialist movements which were (and in some cases are) far stronger and more relevant social forces in the life of their nations than in the imperial core, we can engage with ideas that allow us to strengthen and develop our own mass movements. This is vital in our current era, where the need for Marxists to write new theory has never been greater.

Notes

1. C.L.R James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (London: Duke University Press, 2022), 32. ↩︎
2. Walter Rodney, Walter Rodney Speaks (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 30-1. ↩︎
3. Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920-66 (New York: Signet Books, 1968), 64-5. ↩︎
4. Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity (London: November Publications, 2008), 8-9. ↩︎