Pan-Africanism or Socialism: The Problem with Pan-Africanism Strikes Back
I have been aware of Pan-Africanism Strikes Back for some time now and in this article I wanted to address my views on what Brandon has been doing on social media. I will start by stating that as someone who has been very critical of Tariq Nasheed and FBA, I do understand a lot of his positions. What I don’t understand is why Brandon uses the term “Pan-African” when so much of the content on his channel seems to be aimed at American issues. It seems that he rarely if ever speaks on political issues in Africa and the Caribbean with the same energy that he uses to speak out against FBA and ADOS. I understand that FBA and ADOS have been some of the most vocal critics of Pan-Africanism, but simply being opposed to FBA and ADOS does not make one a Pan-Africanist.
Brandon’s most recent video on socialism displays his lack of familiarity with Pan-Africanism itself. In the video, he accuses Tariq of using socialism to con FBA.
The fact of the matter is that Pan-Africanism does not represent a singular ideology and many Pan-Africanists have been socialists. This is not to suggest that all were, but my point here is that there is a well-documented socialist tradition within the Pan-African movement. Brandon begins the video by speaking of the ideological rift between capitalism and socialism.
Four minutes into the video, Brandon mentions that we have not seen the implementation of socialism leading to the prosperity of any particular nation. This is a curious claim in a Pan-African context because we have no examples of where capitalism has led to prosperous African nations either. Here we see the first problem, which is that Brandon’s worldview seems to be based on Western societies. When he speaks of capitalism and socialism, he’s not speaking for an African-centered perspective. This is reinforced by his claim that socialism has failed wherever it was implemented, but such an argument would ignore the successes made by Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso or the successes made by Maurice Bishop in Grenada. It would also ignore the lengthy history of Western powers intervening to subvert and overthrow socialist governments. How could any self-professed Pan-Africanist overlook this history considering the number of Pan-African leaders who were targeted and even killed for challenging capitalism?
Eighteen minutes into the video Brandon mentions Stalin and Mao as his frame of reference for why socialism is a scam. Why not mention Pan-African leaders such as Julius Nyerere, Thomas Sankara or Kwame Ture? These three men were known for living below their means rather than living a life of luxury at the expense of their people. Moreover, why use Stalin and Mao as references for socialism? Kwame Ture was a Nkrumahist-Toureist. He made it clear that he did not look to the Soviet Union for his model of socialism. What of Walter Rodney, a Marxist who was critical of Stalin and the Soviet Union? In Brandon’s binary approach, he fails to distinguish among the different ideological approaches to socialism. Socialists don’t all represent the same thing just as Pan-Africanists don’t all represent the same thing, which is even demonstrated by the rift which developed between China and the Soviet Union.
This is not to suggest that there have not been serious problems with the implementation of socialism. This is a topic which I have written about in many of my books. In my most recent book, Abraham’s God and African People, there is a chapter which discusses Chris Hani’s criticism of certain abuses which took place under socialist governments around the world. Hani was a member of the Communist Party in South Africa.
Socialists themselves have often been aware of the problems of implementation. The problem with Brandon’s position is that he engages in the usual binary of “socialism is bad” and “capitalism is good.” He isn’t bothered by the poverty and suffering caused by capitalism or the fact that most of the failing governments in Africa today are capitalist in their orientation.
Seven minutes into the video, Brandon claims that socialism is inconsistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. This is yet another statement which exposes his Eurocentric worldview. John Henrik Clarke and Anton Lembede were two Pan-Africanists who embraced socialism because they found it to be compatible with African communalism. Kwame Ture and Julius Nyerere were two other socialists who linked their socialist perspectives to Africa’s communal traditions. Brandon does not address this connection because he probably isn’t even aware of it. He is also not bothered by the fact that capitalism developed in Western societies which were culturally more individualistic than African societies traditionally tended to be. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney demonstrated that Karl Marx’s stages of history could not be applied to Africa. One difference is that the stage of capitalism in Europe was not reached in Africa. Capitalism was introduced to Africa via colonialism.
All of this history and theory seems lost on Brandon, who merely repeats the usual pro-capitalist rhetoric. His analysis of capitalism versus socialism is not a Pan-African analysis. As I stated before, I think there are critiques that can be made against socialism from a Pan-African perspective. I’ve raised some of these critiques in my own writing, but I’m also wary of the binary approach to this type of discussion which falls to look at what socialism has achieved in states where it was implemented.
I find it very curious that Brandon tries to frame what Tariq Nasheed has been doing as an act of socialism. Eight minutes into the video, Brandon claims that socialism is a scam and that Tariq used socialist principles to run his scam. Brandon claims that socialism is against the principles of human behavior, yet he displays his own ignorance of principles of human behavior.
Scams have nothing to do with socialism or even capitalism for that matter. Scams are rooted in the fact that certain dishonest individuals seek to exploit people to gain some sort of an advantage. This can be found across all societies throughout history. Certainly one can point to examples of opportunism on the part of some socialists who have used socialism to advance themselves, but the same is true of capitalism. Charles Ponzi was not a socialist. Bernie Madoff was not a socialist. And Tariq Nasheed is not a socialist. Tariq himself described socialism as a con.
What we really see is that ideologically Brandon isn’t any different than Tariq where socialism is concerned. They both view it as a con. The problem is that Brandon very dishonestly tries to assign socialism to Tariq in his attempt to attack socialism. As I pointed before, Brandon’s attack on socialism is not rooted in a Pan-African perspective. In fact, even his praise for capitalism is not rooted in a serious study of Pan-African ideologies. Marcus Garvey was a capitalist, but he was very critical of certain aspects of capitalism. Garvey explained: “We have not only to fight the white capitalist, but we also have to fight the capitalistic Negro. He will sell his own people into Hell the same as anybody else.” Just as Hani showed that it is possible to be a socialist who is critical of socialism, Garvey showed that one can be a capitalist and be critical of capitalism.
This is why I’ve tried to avoid engaging in ideological binaries. Building an effective Pan-African movement should be about synthesizing different approaches and methods of the past. That’s not what Brandon does here. He merely rehashes pro-capitalist rhetoric which is based on a very Western outlook of the world.
Brandon is also confused about some of this history. Twenty-five minutes into the video, he says that Russia devolved into a slave state under communism, as if prior to he Russian Revolution, Russia was not a feudal society in which peasants were being abused and exploited. Brandon also claims that China devolved into a slave state under Mao as if China didn’t have thousands of years of feudalistic exploitation of the masses before Mao. This matters because the communist revolutions in Russia and China didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. They were responses to oppressive situations which had already existed. And of course Brandon fails to mention any examples of socialism in Africa because his analysis is purely Western.
This is why I think it’s regrettable that Brandon uses Pan-Africanism as the label for his channel. His dishonest attempt to paint Tariq as a socialist exposes that Brandon is using Pan-Africanism to push a right-wing philosophy that has little to do with the Pan-African movement. This is not to suggest that the Pan-African movement is a purely socialist movement, but it certainly has never been a movement to promote Western-style capitalism. This sort of thing does bother me as a Pan-Africanist. It’s bad enough to have ADOS and FBA try to misrepresent Pan-Africanism, but then we also have the problem of those like Brandon who use Pan-Africanism as a banner to oppose ADOS and FBA while pushing an agenda that has little to do with Pan-Africanism.
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Dwayne is the author of The Political and Intellectual Legacy of Walter Rodney
