Status Updates From Military Marxist Regimes in...

It is African Marxism's failure in comparison with its stipulated expected benefits that tends to evoke negative assessments, but not necessarily its mediocre performance in contrast to equally mediocre prior 'capitalist' administrations in the same country. That neither set of alternatives seems to work well in these states underlines the difficulties and the slowness of fundamental change in transitional societies.

Congo apart, in every single instance the ultimate declaration in favour of a Marxist or developmentally radical path came without the semblance of an existing cohesive revolutionary movement, and without the assistance of or pressure from a viable Marxist party. Moreover, where such nuclei did exist (or where they sprang up in response to the 'revolution'), they invariably fell foul of the military elite.

The US Fed rate hike changed up the fiscal game for every state on the planet. But for the African socialist states, it was an earthquake. Benin ran a deficit of almost 300%, Madagascar's Red Admiral fought to implement the IMF's advice after first confidently steering the country into a socialized economy. Parallels with the Warsaw pact countries are stark. "Betrayal" as a cause of downfall is nonse in either case.

Spelled out first in a proclamation of 16 June claiming that 'the only way to achieve development is socialism' , the ideological orientation of the regime was defined in a long speech that was broadcast by radio over several days (August - September 1975) and that, once edited, was to become 'the charter of the Malagasy socialist revolution', better known as boky mena — the red book.

The comparatively large forced labour needs of the [French colonial] Congo-Ocean railway — for the construction of which 25% of the Congo's adult population was harnessed, together with manpower from as far away as the Sara savannah lands of Chad — pulverized traditional norms, and sparked both the proletarianization of labour and what was to become a massive rural-urban drift.

Ideology in the communist movement may be to some extent about blueprints, but it is much more about the creation of an identity for new states and about the legitimation of their governing elites, and about securing the social cohesion required for a programme of development.