None of the continents on Earth are as generalized in the Western media as Africa. Two different images have prevailed. The first, more traditional but nonetheless still common image is one of savagery. While most Westerners hopefully know that the typical African is not technologically living in the stone age, the image of African society promoted by the Western media is often barbaric. The land is seen as being full of pariah states run by dictators who, while their people are starving, steal all the generous foreign aid that comes their way, because, they say, that is the way Africans are. The other, newer image is the headline of “Africa Rising.” In this story, the continent has been rescued by capitalist innovation, and the corruption, poverty, and violence that long plagued Africa will soon be history. For different reasons, both of these portrayals of the continent deserve skepticism.

To begin with, it should be emphasized that both stereotypes reflect some aspects of reality. On one hand, many Africans are very poor (see https://borgenproject.org/10-quick-facts-about-poverty-in-africa/), and a number of their leaders have certainly played a role (see https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/corruption-sub-saharan-africa). On the other, the continent is growing economically (see https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/overview), and some states are now marginally democratic (see https://freedomhouse.org/regions/sub-saharan-africa). Both pictures, however, paint an image of a continent that must be rescued from its own devices. The numerous African dictatorships, past and present, have often been far from pariah states. Rather, they have received significant support from those outside of the continent. When African nations first achieved political independence from the European empires that had ruled them, many places did indeed start out as democracies. However, similar to in Latin American countries such as Chile and Guatemala, leaders that would have benefited the locals too much were conveniently deposed (see https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination). Meanwhile, Africans everywhere continued to fight for just governance in whatever manner that they could, whether it was through political movements, or when the situation came to it, armed resistance. Therefore, there is no reason to blame Africans themselves for the despotic leadership that has been a persistent problem in many of their lands.

The myth also must be dispelled, however, that the status quo is all aspects of life throughout the continent consistently getting better and that they will inevitably continue to do so. To be sure, the early twenty-first century saw many positive trends in Africa, but optimism was also high regarding the continent in the 1960s. These positive trends are only very recent developments, so it is far too early to be celebrating. For example, while a number of long running civil wars in Africa ended in the early to mid-2000s, these conflicts are still fresh, and the countries in which they were fought remain vulnerable to renewed cycles of violence (see https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2010/securing-lasting-peace-africa). Indeed, the negotiations bringing an end to the Second Sudanese Civil War were quickly overshadowed by a new major conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, which turned into a largely unnoticed genocide (see https://ucdp.uu.se/#/actor/112). Furthermore, part of what enabled progress on the continent was a decline in interference from foreigners with the conclusion of the Cold War, but as international tensions are again rising between the United States in the West and its various eastern foes including China, Russia, and militant Islam, the future is uncertain (see https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/old-wounds-deep-scars-us-intervention-africa-20131010101130448232.html).

Several troubling developments have already been seen. Unlike other regions of the globe where the number has fallen, the total number of people living in extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa has risen since 1990 (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2018/11/21/figure-of-the-week-understanding-poverty-in-africa/), and Nigeria has overtaken India as the country with the greatest number of poor (see https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/26/africa/nigeria-overtakes-india-extreme-poverty-intl/index.html). African leaders who would have led juntas in the past now legitimize their power through fraudulent elections, and several have amended constitutions in their countries to eschew term limits, if their countries even had them to begin with (see https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/05/term-ism-africa-150514110217467.html). Despite military coups having generally become less accepted by the international community in the early twenty-first century, countries have in the same timespan had leaders tolerated after assuming power through coups and then holding elections that they ensure they will win, such as in Egypt (see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-19256730) and in Mauritania (see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13882164). Finally, even the condemnation of coups may be waning, as evidenced by the ambivalence to the 2017 overthrow of Robert Mugabe by the Zimbabwean army (see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saunderson-zimbabwe-commentary/commentary-africas-deft-handling-of-zimbabwes-coup-idUSKBN1DL2RP).

The material destitution that still refuses to subside in Africa shows that its people are simply not being rescued by economic growth from capitalism. Even if they were, consider some additional factors. First, capitalism is the source of all sorts of suffering on the continent. For well over a century, Africans have been exploited by foreign empires for their natural resources. This exploitation continues to play a significant role in local oppression and violence. Equatorial Guinea, a small country in West Africa rich in oil and gas, has been ruled with Western support by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo since 1979, when he seized power from his uncle in a military coup (see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-worlds-enduring-dictators-teodoro-obiang-nguema-mbasogo-equatorial-guinea-19-06-2011/). Much more horrifying than autocracy, however, are the civil conflicts many African states have seen that are financed by resources that are sold to the highly industrialized nations of the world, whether the resource is cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, cocoa from the Ivory Coast, diamonds from Angola, oil from Nigeria, or timber from the Central African Republic. Just as Americans prefer to blame local gangsters for the violent crime of Latin America rather than their own domestic drug consumption, they blame only Africans for what goes on in Africa rather than the international economic order. It may be easy for them to condemn Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony on social media after a viral YouTube video on his atrocities, but it is doubtful that many of them would then think twice about the source of their lithium batteries.

Furthermore, even if some of the wealth from the exploitation of Africa should eventually trickle down to the locals, better solutions are urgently needed. If for no other reason, the children of Africa deserve a better future, but currently many will not have one at all. In 2011, sub-Saharan Africa had a child mortality rate of one in nine, compared to only one in 152 in the developed world. Part of the reason for this is disease. Ninety percent of malaria cases in the world today occur in Africa, while sixty percent of the global population living with HIV/AIDS is in Africa (see https://www.who.int/bulletin/africanhealth/en/). While malaria is endemic to much of Africa due to the tropical climate, if it can be largely prevented in other tropical regions there is no reason that the same cannot occur in Africa. Similarly, while HIV and AIDS are a problem throughout the world, the disproportionate toll that the virus and the disease it causes have on Africa demonstrate that something simply is wrong.

Westerners often associate the African continent with famine, and indeed, malnutrition and undernourishment are pervasive problems. Twenty percent of all Africans were undernourished in 2016 (see https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/20/world/famine-fast-facts/index.html). In the Central African Republic alone, a small country of only 4.6 million, as many as thirty children starve to death every day (see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-centralafrican-violence-children-feat-idUSKCN0ZG00D). Since the 1980s, all of the famines that the world has seen have occurred in Africa except for the 1990s famine in North Korea, and serious famines are not a thing of the past in Africa (see https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/03/By-continent-and-decade-01.png). A 2010-2012 famine in Somalia killed 260,000 people, and a more recent famine that began in South Sudan in February of 2017 has caused over forty percent of the South Sudanese to be in need of humanitarian assistance (see https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/20/world/famine-fast-facts/index.html). Capitalists often blame the great famines from the twentieth century on socialism, and indeed, some severe famines occurred in that era in the communist states of Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, and Russia. However, the economies of both Somalia and South Sudan are unquestionably rooted in capitalism, a system that has failed their impoverished peoples, all whilst the governments of the West are endlessly busy debating the definition of marriage or how much the richest among them should owe in taxes and ignoring the real problems of the world.

Capitalism has not exactly done Africa wonders. As stated earlier, some in the media enjoy emphasizing how the economic growth rate in Africa has been much faster in the last several years. Nevertheless, the reality remains that per capita income rose by an average of a mere 0.7 percent a year from 1960 to 2016 (see https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Africa-Growth-Paper_Gill-and-Karakulah_June-15.pdf). If the United States even went a decade with an average rate of growth that low, the end of the American dream would be proclaimed, and it should be noted that since the size of the United States economy is much larger than that of any country in Africa, direct comparisons cannot be made. However, the future of Africa does not have to be bleak, as it is a continent with enormous potential. While all of Africa has been held back by the international economic order, perhaps the country that has had its prospects squashed the most over the years has been the Democratic Republic of Congo. Right now, the reality is that the country cannot feed itself. In 2017, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization warned that 7.7 million Congolese required humanitarian aid or they could face starvation (see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-congo-conflict-hunger-idUSKCN1AU0WM). While less than two percent of it is actually being cultivated at the moment, the majority of Congolese land is arable, with a climate favorable to many crops. It has even been said that the country could possibly supply the food needs of the entire continent (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/specialsales/spotlight/congo/food.html). At the moment, children toil in Congolese mines for a dollar a day, but perhaps one day the Congolese people can instead benefit from the $24 trillion in mineral deposits in their country rather than be exploited by a variety of oppressors, both local and foreign. (see https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/children-as-young-as-seven-mining-cobalt-for-use-in-smartphones-says-amnesty).

The Democratic Republic of Congo is certainly not the only country in Africa that is rich in natural resources, and nor is it the only one that could be benefiting from them. Most leaders in the West are of the opinion that there is no alternative to capitalism, and this is not surprising. The system is currently working for them and most of the people in their countries, letting them not only survive but thrive, economically at least. Hence, Western leaders claim that questioning capitalism is dangerous. Capitalism, they say, brings prosperity, while socialism brings poverty. In the days of German-born socialist writer Karl Marx, wealth may have been concentrated in the hands of a few, but this has changed, they say. The reality is that capitalism has merely globalized, leaving parts of the world largely rich while others have remained largely poor. In The Communist Manifesto, the socialist writing duo of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves wrote back in 1848 that capitalism had created a dependence of “nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007).” Such a reality that was only beginning to emerge in that era has now been fully realized. The common term “developing nation” implies that gradual industrialization will eventually enrich the global periphery as well. This assumes that there are enough resources in the world for everyone to be rich, when in reality there simply are not. The goal should not be to make everyone in the world wealthy, but rather to give everyone an adequate standard of living, and for this to happen, entire countries cannot be living in excess, just as they should not be thoroughly destitute. A world in which everyone lives modestly by current Western standards is very much preferable to one in which the West lives in luxury while numerous Africans, as well as others in the periphery, are deprived of basic necessities.

Defenders of global capitalism will say that it is impossible to have a system that works for everyone, but the status quo still works for many people. Socialism, they argue, is much more extreme than capitalism in that it only works for those at the top. Winston Churchill, one of the most famous prime ministers of the United Kingdom, once famously remarked, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries (see https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/socialism-is-the-philosophy-of-failure-winston-churchill/).” Of course, capitalism does not even equally share food and shelter, which should not be “blessings,” although many Africans would certainly feel blessed if they had the same security regarding food and shelter that most in the United Kingdom have had since the days of Churchill. Still, however, the idea that socialism creates a society of an “equal sharing of miseries,” or one where only powerful bureaucrats benefit, is worth examining. Russia under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, China under Mao Zedong, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and a multitude of other societies have suffered under socialist rule. Rarely mentioned is how much the average citizens of Western societies have benefited from socialism. In fact, much of the reason the working class is better off in Europe and North America now than in the days of Marx is because of socialist policies that African and other peripheral states continue to be lacking in, whether the policy is a decent minimum wage, public education, social security, or outside of the United States, universal healthcare.

Opponents of socialism will still likely make the argument that these are limited reforms based on socialist principles rather than socialism itself. Total socialism, the argument goes, can only be totalitarianism, with the evidence being history. The experiment with socialist states began in October of 1917, when the Bolsheviks, a left-wing political party led by Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, seized power in Russia, a country with strong authoritarian traditions. Decades later in 1949, the Chinese Civil War concluded with another Marxist revolutionary, Mao Zedong, taking over a country that had also historically been ruled with an iron fist. In the years that followed, a number of new socialist states arose around the globe, following either the Marxist-Leninist or the Maoist model. They had little choice, as China and Russia were the only powers in the world who would sponsor socialist movements. Others, such as the United States, worked to crush these movements. Alliances with the warped, supposedly socialist societies of China and Russia were alliances of necessity in a dark time. Unfortunately, when socialists were successful in establishing their governments elsewhere, they ended up as the puppets of either the Chinese or the Russians.

The end of the Cold War is often proclaimed to have been the death of socialism. Today, however, with the Soviet Union long gone, socialists are now free to pursue their cause without having to be subordinate to the will of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Another benefit of the Cold War ending is that United States aggression towards the socialists of the world has waned, as evidenced by attempts by some American politicians to have more open relations with Cuba and North Korea as well as their somewhat greater acceptance recently of socialists in their own government. It should be noted, however, that there are still some modern examples of hostility by the United States government towards socialism. Not all American politicians have supported the opening up of relations with Cuba or North Korea, and most are still vehemently opposed to their country embracing additional socialist policies. Members of the American government continue to be particularly hostile towards socialists in Latin America. They have condemned current socialist leaders in the region, especially Evo Morales of Bolivia, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, with President Donald Trump even threatening the Venezuelans with military intervention (see https://www.salon.com/2019/02/01/cia-in-venezuela-7-rules-for-regime-change_partner/). The State Department of the United States government continues to list various left-wing guerilla movements in South America, such as the National Liberation Army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and the Shining Path, as foreign terrorist organizations (see https://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm). As these groups engage in violence as a means of achieving political objectives, these would be fair labels, except that the United States has also given training and weapons to rebels in the brutal ongoing Syrian Civil War. In Syria, the American objective seems to have been the overthrow of a Russian puppet state (see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23849587). This is also violence with a political objective, and one rooted merely in power rather than ideology.

Africa was a proxy battlefield between the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War, so its recent history is already intertwined with socialism. Regarding the Soviet Union, it should be made clear that its overall story was mostly one of failure in executing socialism. The Russian and Eastern European peoples were highly oppressed under the Soviet government, which was also often just as imperialistic as the United States and other Western powers. Still, the Soviet Union deserves credit for assisting in the independence movements in places such as Angola, a nation that remained under the rule of the imperialistic regime in Portugal until 1975. Other socialist states also played roles. When South Africa and the United States began aiding insurgents to overthrow the new government in Angola after it had gained its independence, Cuban head of state Fidel Castro sent thousands of his soldiers. The point here is not that socialist leaders such as Castro were always perfect, but rather that most of them, with some exceptions including Stalin, have not been the monsters that children in the United States are taught they were. Nelson Mandela, the revered late former President of South Africa, remarked, “We are deeply indebted to the Cuban people for the selfless contribution they made to the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle in our region (see https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/02/east-west-cold-war-legacy-africa-160214113015863.html).” The Soviet Union had given support to the African National Congress in South Africa. The United States, meanwhile, supported the apartheid regime in the country as well as the nearby government of Rhodesia, which had a similar policy of excluding native Africans from being able to be civically engaged until 1980, when it became Zimbabwe (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/12chapter8.shtml). Mandela remained on the terrorist watchlist of the American government until 2008 (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7484517.stm).

None of this is to deny key problems in the socialist states of the twentieth century. True socialism involves democratic control of the means of production. Democracy and socialism are in fact different manifestations of the same concept, with democracy being primarily political and socialism being primarily economic. Real socialism requires democracy as it would have a government that is accountable to the workers. Similarly, democracy cannot be real without socialism. Under capitalism, most societal institutions are inherently undemocratic. Therefore, the Soviet Union was not real socialism, and the United States is not a real democracy. Marx himself supported democracy, as was made clear in his 1843 work A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where he criticized the monarchies that still ruled most of the world at the time in favor of a more democratic system (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch02.htm#041).

A phrase associated with Marxism, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” is often misunderstood. It refers not to a dictatorship in the modern sense but rather society being dictated by the working-class majority, as opposed to a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” Marx recognized that it was possible for the latter system of bourgeois rule to be thinly disguised as a democracy. As was written by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007).” Africa today, despite routine elections and universal suffrage being the norm in most of the continent, continues to be a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Local politics are often so corrupt, not to mention manipulated by outsiders, that the typical African country still has a very long way to go before the people are truly in charge. Furthermore, sometimes power in Africa is not even held by governments, locally or somewhere else, but instead by the men outside of the state apparatus with the greatest number of abducted children wielding the most automatic rifles. Some such men, such as Charles Taylor, have been captured. Others, such as Jonas Savimbi, have been killed. Still more, such as Joseph Kony, remain on the run. Perhaps most important to mention, however, are the former commanders of kids carrying Kalashnikovs that have been rewarded by eventually becoming important members of the government. Perhaps Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni should have faced somewhat more scrutiny about the ages of his soldiers when he originally seized power in 1986 (see https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/04/world/a-child-s-lot-in-uganda-at-14-a-combat-veteran.html).

Another common criticism of many of the socialist experiments of the past is that their economies are inefficient and prone to sluggish growth. However, a truly efficient economy is not one that grows quickly at the expense of the natural resources of the world while enriching only a few. The alleged progress in the world from capitalist economic growth is but an illusion. It merely results in the consumption of ever greater quantities of dwindling resources. Societies worldwide need not produce more. Instead, they need to justly share what they produce. For example, there is no shortage of food in the world that additional production would remedy. Current global food production could feed a population of ten billion, a number of people which the world is not expected to have until 2050, if the apparently efficient capitalist economy were actually competent enough to properly allocate it (see https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-hunger_b_1463429). According to the staunchest capitalists, any state planning in the economy is tyranny, even if it is to help the poor. At the same time, they see nothing as tyrannical about multinational corporations based in rich countries planning the economies of the periphery.

One of the most prominent African socialists, despite being unknown to most people in the West, was Julius Nyerere. Like all politicians, as well as people more generally, Nyerere was far from perfect. He was President of Tanzania from 1962 until 1985, and similar to a number of other devoted socialist leaders from history, he was capable of feeling that since he thought that he knew what was best for his people that he did not have to tolerate opposition (see https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nyerere/biography.htm). Anyone who has read works by Lenin, whether Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm) or The State and Revolution (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm), knows that he was an accomplished Marxist intellectual who felt deeply about his cause, but once in power, he also put first his own ability to dictate society the way he felt it should be. Very unfortunately, this decision by Lenin set a precedent for numerous future socialists, Nyerere included. Still, despite his authoritarian ruling style, Nyerere deserves credit for a number of accomplishments that he made for Tanzanian society.

Nyerere laid out his vision for Tanzania in the“Arusha Declaration and TANU’s Policy on Socialism and Self-Reliance,” with the acronym referring to his party, the Tanganyika African National Union. This document reiterates many basic socialist principles but also makes several of his specific beliefs clear. One is his preference for a blend of socialism and preserving the tradition of a rural, agrarian Africa. However, this is not to say that Nyerere agreed with all African traditions. In particular, he condemned the manner in which women performed long hours of work for no pay (seehttps://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nyerere/1967/arusha-declaration.htm). During his years leading the people of Tanzania, Nyerere achieved several impressive feats. By 1973, maternal mortality had more than halved, and by 1985, Tanzania reached a primary school enrollment rate of ninety-six percent, higher than anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa. Notably, regarding the latter, half of the Tanzanian students in primary school were female (see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/11/tanzania-hidden-socialist-history-president-julius-nyerere). In 1970, only thirty-four percent of Tanzanian children of primary school age were enrolled (see https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.PRM.ENRR?view=chart). Moreover, in all of sub-Saharan Africa, the rate was only seventy-nine percent as recently as 2012 (seehttps://en.unesco.org/gem-report/sites/gem-report/files/regional_overview_SSA_en.pdf). Those who might think Nyerere was seeking only power should note that he did not achieve great wealth leading Tanzania as many other African heads of state have. In his final years, long after leaving Tanzanian politics, Nyerere played a role in helping to mediate the civil war in Burundi (see https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nyerere/biography.htm).

The socialists widely known in the West are mostly European. Perhaps the only major exceptions are those which have come out of China. Despite this, a number of accomplished members of the socialist movement have been from a variety of African nations as well (see https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/index.htm). There have been far too many such individuals in history to explore all the contributions or ideas of in this essay, but perhaps one quote from Kwame Nkrumah stands out. “Colonialism deserves to be blamed for many evils in Africa, but surely it was not preceded by an African Golden Age or paradise. A return to the pre-colonial African society is evidently not worthy of the ingenuity and efforts of our people (see https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/1967/african-socialism-revisited.htm).” Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence and later became its President before his army deposed him in 1966 (see https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/n/k.htm#nkrumah-kwame), was a socialist who recognized that Africa had to move beyond its exploitation by the imperial powers of the world, but that it also could not simply embrace all aspects of its past as the solution. He pointed to the fact that Africans had traditionally enslaved one another even prior to widespread contact with Europeans.

Just as the Chinese have ended their ancient practice of foot binding and Indians are slowly but surely moving away from the caste system, Africans must be willing to condemn oppressive customs. Those offended by this statement should remember what some of these practices are and the fact that many Africans want them to end. While it is still widely practiced, Africans across the continent have begun to condemn female genital mutilation. Some ancient customs are very difficult to end, however. Although slavery is illegal in every African state today, it is estimated that there are still millions of slaves across the continent, with a particularly high concentration in West Africa. One West African country, Mauritania, has only 3.8 million people but an estimated 150,000 slaves, the majority of them toiling as cattle herders or domestic laborers for their masters (seehttp://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/17/world/la-fg-wn-slavery-africa-20131017). While Mauritania officially abolished slavery in 1981, laws did not allow for the prosecution of slave owners until 2007, and these laws continue to remain mostly unenforced. The Mauritanian government, meanwhile, continues to imprison and torture activists who protest slavery. One such activist is on death row, apparently for “blasphemy” related to his blog postings (see https://www.cfr.org/blog/state-slavery-mauritania).

Marxism continues to provide a useful blueprint for understanding the socioeconomic history of the world, especially regarding the development of global capitalism. His writings offered insight on numerous aspects of the society that he lived in, much of which remains relevant. Certainly, a number of his ideas have held up better than others, some of which were simply a product of the era. It is the recommendation of the author of this essay that readers become familiar with key Marxist works. A website called the Marxists Internet Archive is an excellent resource. It contains works archived from not only Marx and Engels (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/date/index.htm) but many other socialist writers from over the years, whether one wishes to learn what some of the famous socialists such as Lenin (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/sw/index.htm) or Trotsky (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/index.htm) had to say or perhaps someone lesser known. Regarding Marx, the best place to start is The Communist Manifesto, which is light on economics and instead focuses mainly on the Marxist theory of history, his critique of capitalist society, and further details on the socialist movement and its objectives (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm). Marxist economics are more dated, but they are laid out in great detail in The Grundrisse (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/grundrisse.pdf) and Das Kapital (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/) if one wishes to understand them.

The remainder of this essay shall reference The Communist Manifesto (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm). The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” is a concise explanation of the Marxist worldview and is one of the strongest passages that Marx or Engels ever wrote. While the second chapter, “Proletarians and Communists,” discusses a number of ideas, perhaps the piece of greatest significance is near its end, where Marx and Engels design a ten-point plan for what policies a state run by the workers should implement. Concluding this essay will be a discussion of how, in what ways, and to what degree such policies can apply to modern Africa. Most of what shall be written is also applicable to socialist societies more generally. The first policy proposed by Marx and Engels involves the nationalization of land. Currently, land is very important in Africa, as forty-eight percent of Africans are farmers. It is important to note that most of them farm on a very small scale. Thirty-three million farms in Africa, or eighty percent of the total, are smaller than two hectares, but the livelihood of these African farmers is today being threatened by the incursion of much larger corporate farms with which they simply cannot compete (see http://www.un.org/en/africa/osaa/pdf/pubs/2013africanagricultures.pdf).

There are three main approaches to land ownership in a socialist society. One is to simply ignore the issue and to allow for all land to remain in private hands. However, for a true socialist society to develop, especially in largely agrarian economies such as those in Africa, there cannot continue to be massive disparities in land ownership. Another approach is to collectivize the entire society, as Stalin and Mao both attempted. At first glance, many socialists see this as the ideal approach, as it theoretically allows for the complete abolition of private land ownership. All the land in a country, they hope, would belong to the people as a whole. The fatal flaw is that this requires the central government to manage and plan all of the land. When everything belongs to the government, as was seen under the leadership of the aforementioned Stalin and Mao, the result is totalitarianism at its worst. A final approach is a more communal one, which is a compromise of sorts. Under the approach, individuals do not own land, but land still belongs to specific communities rather than the entire society. While this is the most reasonable approach of the three in that it empowers the people over either the capitalist ruling class or socialist central planners, it is still not without its flaws. In Africa especially, much of the population, due to capitalist oppression, lacks the education to manage wide tracks of land and all of the resources and industries that the land may contain.

There is a further compromise that can be made. Rather than arranging land ownership to be completely in one category throughout a country, there must be a blend that suits the needs of its society. Therefore, there should be three categories of land in a socialist society. The first would be personal land, which in fact differs from private land in that it is individually owned but does not produce capital. Personal land, for example, could be a home to live in, a small garden to supply a family with fruits and vegetables, and a pen with some livestock. Families would produce for themselves what they desired and be free to barter with other members of their communities. These communities, in turn, would communally own the land surrounding the personal land of their residents. This would be community land and would include whatever the residents could maintain for their own benefit, such as local farmland, roads, and water supplies. Finally, there would also be state land, managed by economic planners. State land would consist of land with resources difficult for individual communities to manage or land that the state would require in order to function, examples being oilfields and military posts, respectively. Over time, as the populace becomes more educated and independent, there would be a gradual transfer of all but the most essential state land to the communes.

Marx and Engels also suggest the creation of progressive income taxes. In many countries today, of course, such taxes are taken for granted, although in the nineteenth century the taxes that existed often penalized the poor more than the rich. Taxes in a modern socialist society would take the forms of taxes on both production and income, with communities taxed instead of individuals, since members of communities would cooperate to be produce goods and food. The majority of these goods and food they would keep, but a substantial minority would be collected by the state to distribute to areas that could not produce those particular commodities. As an incentive to be productive, communities could choose to contribute additional goods and food in order to receive more from the state of what they could not produce themselves. The commodities communities produce and keep could be kept for their own use or sold to neighboring communities. The idea would be to not waste surpluses, although to prevent this from turning anywhere into a major capitalist enterprise, income from these sales would be taxed at a highly progressive rate.

Another policy advocated for by Marx and Engels is to eliminate the societal practice of allowing for inheritance, presumably to prevent families from gaining generational advantages over one another. This refers not to personal possessions, but rather capital, instruments of production, and land, which have become highly concentrated in almost any society, not just those in Africa. After an owner of personal land passes away, the plot that they owned should be returned to the community that they belonged to, only so it can be given to somebody new. However, there need not be an issue with family members being given the land of the deceased, so long as they are active members of the community that the land is a part of. The next policy suggested by Marx and Engels, and one that certainly generates more controversy, is the idea that those who leave the country or revolt against socialism should have their assets taken. Nonetheless, violent revolts cannot be tolerated by a socialist government just as they would not be by any other system. Meanwhile, the previous policy that Marx and Engels were proposing was not a stance against emigration but rather a suggestion on how to stop those with resources from simply taking them abroad so that they would not have to contribute to the socialist society. It can be thought of as a tax, and not even one that necessarily would have to be the entirety of the assets of the individual in question. In Africa, it would be critical to ensure that wealth did not simply leave.

Points five, six, and seven all involve the nationalization of various institutions, from banking to communications. The eighth point then states that all must contribute to society. Both of these ideas become difficult to implement, as they greatly increase the authority of the state. While such institutions cannot be owned privately in a true socialist society and they will also require workers, the answer is not totalitarianism. Part of the solution involves giving as much power as is possible to local communities rather than the central government. In many areas, the authority will need to be shared in what would resemble a federal structure. For example, for banks, there would be a national headquarters as well as individual branches belonging to and staffed by communities. Where work requirements are concerned, much should be left to communities. For example, they would set their own number of work hours per week, with the government setting regulations for minimum and maximum totals so that communities would be neither unproductive nor overworked. Young adults would be required to spend several years employed directly by the central government following their education in order to train them in various other skills and to keep the larger, state-owned industries running. Unlike in the Soviet Union, however, such a requirement would certainly not be for the duration of the careers of everyone in the population.

The ninth point in The Communist Manifestosuggests that the existence urban and rural areas as society knows them should slowly be eliminated, presumably with the goal of eliminating disparities in affluence and political power between the two. While a fine notion, it would be nearly impossible to execute. Fortunately, however, the spread of modern technology is steadily removing the divides between the city and the countryside anyway. This leaves the tenth and final point, which calls for children to be removed from factories and placed in public schools. While even most Western capitalists can agree on this one in the twenty-first century, there continue to be too many children in Africa working instead of getting an education, and a true socialist government of an African nation would do everything reasonable in its power to change this. With this and the other aforementioned suggestions for a socialist society in Africa in mind, perhaps one day the dream can be implemented, and the thus far exaggerated headline of “Africa rising” can become a reality.