Socialism Is A Political Farrago

 By Ebou Jallow, Baghdad, Iraq 

In political discourse it is always important to be vigilant against pretentious diction and Orwellian obfuscation, which are nothing but tools of distortion and categories of linguistic deceit.   Democratic socialism and social democracy are all mutants of socialism none of which has ever decisively solved mankind’s economic problems anywhere on planet earth.  Socialism in any form is as dead as Margret Thatcher once dubbed it the “British Disease”.  From the beginning, socialism deemed equality as a rational condition of life, which must be engineered through government planning in order to substitute common ownership for private property.  Karl Marx debunked this notion offering instead what he called “scientific socialism”.  Marx borrows Hegel’s historical dialectic to prove that socialism has the ultimate purpose of materializing communism at the end of history and this can be brought about by some impersonal force hence turning socialism into a religious prophecy- a dramatic evolution from the rationality of socialism to its historical inevitability.  No wonder today we have all kinds of fanatical isms on a quixotic crusade to build a utopia on earth.   

None of the social democratic parties of Europe (12 EU countries) is yet to produce a genuine socialism. Instead, all have huge bureaucracies that provide safety nets in the progress of free market economics hence always compromising economic efficiency.  In France, Lionel Jospin, a onetime Prime Minister under Mitterand and the Secretary General of the French Socialist Party, has conclusively recognized that socialism is a kind of tax upon capitalism but not a viable alternative.  One wonders why African politicians are still so enamored with such a degenerate and failed socio-economic ideology.  This is exactly the same question that Kwame Nkrumah once asked in his work, Consciencism. Mark you that Nkrumah, a self-described “scientific socialist” was frenetically trying to distance himself from the “African Socialists”, i.e. Leopold Sedar Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Modibo Keita, Lamin Gueye, Mamadou Dia, et. al, whom he thought to be absolutely phony trying to promote socialism with a chauvinist dogma of “Negritude” or African cultural pride.  Nkrumah accused them of making a “fetish of African communal society” in the name of socialism, and I quote his own very words:

“Feudalism existed in some parts of Africa before colonization; and feudalism involves a deep and exploitative social stratification, founded on the ownership of land. It must also be noted that slavery existed in Africa before European colonization, although the earlier European contact gave slavery in Africa some of its most vicious characteristics. The truth remains, however, that before colonization, which became widespread in Africa only in the Nineteenth Century, Africans were prepared to sell, often for no more than thirty pieces of silver, fellow tribesmen and even members of the same “extended family” and clan. Colonialism deserves to be blamed for many evils in Africa, but surely it was not preceded by an African Golden Age or paradise.”

Nkrumah, in my opinion, was up to some interesting depth psychology of all communal based identity politics (us against them): Tribalism, socialism and feudal ethnic chauvinism all have one thing in common- a chronic disregard for individual property rights.  When individual rights are abrogated there is no way to determine who is entitled to what and no guide to determine justice of any one’s claims or interests.  The only criterion of truth reverts back to the tribal concept: one’s wishes are limited only by the power of one’s gang- a tribalist sells other human beings from a different tribe into bondage just as a socialist would tax to death a hard working entrepreneur to satisfy his party’s misguided notion of social equality.  In order to survive under such a system, men have no choice but to fear, hate and destroy one another.  Such a system has been prevalent in Africa to a point where contemporary politics in most African countries is nothing but a system of underground plotting, deals, secret conspiracies, favors, betrayals and sudden bloody coups. 

Seriously, the history of socialism in Africa whatsoever their policies, practices, programs or principles, is nothing but mere intellection without substance or meaning.  Some political parties simply exploit the “socialist” slogan to fit their own idiosyncratic agendas.  Socialism in whatsoever form (democratic socialism or social democracy) has this grand delusion of setting up a technocratic “nanny state” or welfare-statism, a high-cost system that cannot be sustained in a world of international economic competition and integration.  Wherever central planning has been put into effect, entrepreneurship is alienated thus crowding out free market efficiency.  The last thing that The Gambia needs is a socialist government by any other name.  Capitalism is a system based on individual rights and rewards the productive.  It is based on man’s right to work for his own sake and there is nothing evil or mysterious about that.  The self-made individual that emerges from such a system is not some imaginary hobgoblin that “exploits” but a philanthropist such as Bill Gates that has done more good to Africa than any socialist in history.