Neither Bourgeois Elections nor Aimless Struggle: Toward class war in Africa

FAITH KASINA

The masses have long realized that to change their situation, they must aggregate their power. This realization has spawned all kinds of social movements, trade unions, and other types of organizations. 

Some social movements are organized to fight for reforms in the already-choking system; others are organizing towards a revolutionary path. All these are important: quantity can lead to quality. But ideological grounding prevents us from becoming too comfortable with modest reforms. Ideological grounding reminds us that the end goal is a total change of the system — the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Revolutionary Amilcar Cabral said, “Never again do we want our people to be exploited. Our desire to develop our country with social justice and power in the hands of our people is our ideological basis. Never again do we want to see a group or a class of people exploiting or dominating the work of our people.”

All the issues we organize our communities around are political: lack of water, unemployment, education, healthcare. If we reduce our organizing to focus solely on “social” aspects of life, we willfully deceive ourselves into believing this can be divorced from political and economic liberation. “Social movements”—once a radical notion—have been reduced to the conducting of internal dialogues, the planning and conducting demonstrations, the delivering of petitions. Ironically, “social movement” in today’s colloquial discourse is all but synonymous with the voluntary relinquishing of one’s power. Popular social movement life, as we now know it, therefore does not provide a lasting solution.

If we are keen to liberate ourselves politically, then we cannot shy away from fighting and organizing for political power. Although we don’t always have forests and mountains to train our people in, Cabral tells us that the people are our mountains. The people do not join movements because they want to pass time; people join movements because they are in search of alternatives. These alternatives have to capture their political, social, and economic spheres of life. Shying away from politics then leaves them stranded and unsure of their proper direction. They become prey to anyone lying and pretending to support the values they stand for, anyone with a slick tongue. During the 2022 elections in Kenya, voters bought the hustler narrative because the people selling it pretended to understand the plight of workers and peasants. Only later did peasants and workers realize that they trusted a wolf, and now it was time to be eaten.

Our war is class war. The only way to liberate ourselves is to have our own people occupy decision-making spaces. Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, argues that the working class could only achieve true political power by creating a counter-hegemonic culture that challenged the dominant ideology. The only way we can create this counter-hegemonic culture is if we dedicate ourselves to organizing and educating the masses to understand who our enemy is, why we are fighting, and what the end goal is.

Our main calling is to provide empirical analyses of our current situations, and then actual strategies and tactics that can overthrow class domination. Within a capitalist system, anything short of political organizing will never provide a sufficient solution. Bourgeois elections are also not the answer. The answer is the overthrow of the exploiting system by the exploited. Political education will help get us there.

The Arab Spring in Tunisia and elsewhere warns us that even when the people win and the dictators flee, the people can still fail to seize the opportunity to self-govern. My comrade Gacheke Gachihi asks us as we organize, “If the people were to take over and political power fell on the streets, would we grab it?” Are we ready? What shows whether we are ready or not? And if we are not ready, how do we get ready?

During the 2022 elections in Kenya, the left was blowing with the wind and following anyone and everyone, as long as they were not part of the previous ruling regime. This shows that there is a big gap when it comes to political organizing. To answer Gachihi: we are not ready. There is so much that needs to be done to make sure that we are ready to take power. Kenya’s left attempted to settle for the lesser evil.

Until the peoples’ organizations organize themselves politically, they’ll not stop wandering in circles. Once social movements develop a political outfit, they can achieve a total overhaul of the exploitative system.