This article attempts to identify Tanzanian Ujamaa with Scientific Socialism in certain ideological essentials. It is an exercise in theory, bearing in mind that historically the theory of socialism preceded the establishment of socialism as a system in any part of the globe. Scientific Socialism (or Marxism, if you like) is an explicit world-view which contemplates every conceivable phenomenon from protein to literature, in terms of a methodology applicable to nature and society. Therefore, the comparison with Tanzanian Ujamaa is not completely analogous, since the latter is neither explicit nor all-embracing. However, the same kind of reservation could probably be expressed for any ideological variant other than Scientific Socialism. One must, in most cases, seek ideology in human actions, combined to greater or lesser extent with statements of principle or policy. The Tanzanian political process has produced over the last decade several noteworthy declarations of principle and sufficient actions which give meaning to the said declarations. The work 'Ujamaa' has already been popularized in two contexts: firstly, as referring to the extended family of African communalism; secondly, with reference to the creation of agricultural collectives known as Ujamaa villages. The relation between the two is that the Ujamaa villages seek to recapture the principles of joint production, egalitarian distribution and the universal obligation to work which were found within African communalism. In the present discussion the world 'Ujamaa' incorporates both of these meanings, and includes also the implications of several policy documents and public plans.
Footnotes Abridged1. J.K. Nyerere, 'Ujamaa - the Basis of African Socialism' (1962), in Freedom and Unity, p. 162. The opening sentences make this point - 'Socialism, like democracy, is an attitude of mind .... The purpose of this paper is to examine that attitude. It is not intended to define the institutions which may be required to embody it in modern society.'
2. Significantly, Tanzanians or foreign observers who have been left behind by the trend towards heightened socialist understanding seldom pay attention to more recent pronouncements of Mwalimu Nyerere, but consider 'Ujamaa - the Basis of African Socialism' as a final blueprint.
A necessary piece of ground-clearing must be performed by advancing the negative proposition that Tanzanian Ujamaa is not 'African Socialism'. Such a disclaimer may appear curious and even presumptuous in view of the fact that in 1962 Mwalimu Nyerere referred to Ujamaa as 'the basis of African Socialism'. But, there are several reasons for keeping the two concepts widely apart. When 'African Socialism' was in vogue early in the 1960s, it comprised a variety of interpretations raging from a wish to see a socialist society in Africa to a desire to maintain the status quo of neo-colonialism. Since then the term has come to be identified with its most consistent and least revolutionary ideologue, Leopold Senghor, and with the late Tom Mboya. As such, 'African Socialism' is generally taken to mean a set of relations which leave capitalism and imperialism unchallenged. It is therefore essential to disassociate the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist stance in Tanzania from a caption that has been pre-empted by non-revolutionary African leaders. Furthermore, when Ujamaa was presented as an option shortly after the independence of Tanganyika, it was (knowingly) defined as an abstract set of values without reference to the social forms necessary for their realization.1 Much has now been done in the way of policy decisions to indicate and build the relevant social structures, thereby further differentiating Ujamaa from its erstwhile counterparts of 'African Socialism' in so far as the latter never advanced from the ideal to the real. Above all, one must take note of the progressive evolution of Tanzanian theory and practice over the period of nearly a decade, as a positive response to national, African and international developments.2
Conversely, to associate Ujamaa with the category 'Scientific Socialism' seems to be flying in the face of assertions to the contrary by Tanzanian policy makers. Scientific Socialism is held to be synonymous with Marxism, Communism, and the like, which have been held at arm's length by Tanzanians who propound Ujamaa. The contradiction is more apparent than real. In part, it disappears when one take into account the above-mentioned factor of significant politico-ideological advance from Arusha to Mwongozo. In addition, and more decisively, the difference is largely based on a caricature of Scientific Socialism (Marxism), which proposes that socialism must come through proletarian revolution within an already developed capitalist state. Such a definition would automatically exclude Tanzanian Ujamaa, which looks toward the socialist organisation of peasants and seeks to revive and perpetuate the collective principle of production and the equalitarian nature of distribution which characterised communalism. As carried out both by some self-professed Marxists and by bourgeois analysts, the transformation of Marxism into a barren, dogmatic, mechanistic and uni-dimensional theory has understandably led many creative individuals to reject what purports to be Scientific Socialism. To re-open the issue, one must go back to first principles and rescue the essence of Scientific Socialism.
Socialism emerged as an ideology within the capitalist society. All of its exponents saw the viciousness of capitalism and agreed on the need for replacing the prevailing production for private profit with a system which met the needs of all. However, they were not agreed on either the precise content of socialist society or the means by which it was to be instituted. It is in these areas that the necessity arose for distinguishing between unrealistic socialist hopes and a more rigorous analysis which could claim to meet the canons of scientific method and which by its correctness guaranteed meaningful action for the realisation of socialism. For Marx, 'Scientific Socialism' is quite simply socialism that is scientific.
Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier and other pioneer socialists of the early 19th century were dubbed 'utopian' by Marx and Engels for a variety of reasons, notably because they failed to appreciate that human social development proceeded through certain stages and because their model socialist societies did not take cognisance of the reality of class struggle. On the other hand, the rubric 'Scientific Socialism' still attaches to the mode of perception which predicts the emergence of socialism as a produce of the dialectic movement of all previous history and as a consequence of the triumph of the working class. Utopian socialism or at least utopian elements in socialist thought have persisted and re-appeared from time to time. 'African Socialism' is utopian in its refusal to come to grips with the class relations in which Africans are enmeshed and in its romanticised ignorance of the stages of African historical development. It is the contention of the author, that in contrast, Tanzanian Ujamaa is correct in its perception of the principal motion of its own society.
The assertion that 'there are no classes in Africa' is often used to justify capitalist investment in the continent and in recent times it has come under criticism from progressive African thinkers. Firstly, it must be noted that the international character of capitalist production in the era of imperialism has placed the propertied class in the metropoles while the greater portion of their working force resides in the colonial or semi-colonial areas. Secondly, the colonial sectors show varying degrees of stratification and class formation as a consequence of their integration in the international capitalist economy. Both of these features are recognized in the Tanzanian policy documents which elaborate on the theory of Ujamaa: TANU's Arusha Declaration and Mwalimu Nyerere's Socialism and Rural Development being the most relevant.
The Arusha Declaration had little to say about the development of socialism in the countryside beyond expressing the opinion that concern for the peasant farmer must be a priority. However, this document set the stage for the policy of constructing Ujamaa villages by expropriating the foreign capitalist class who until then were owners of the major means of production within Tanzania. It stated unequivocally that the major means of production are under the control and ownership of the peasants and the workers themselves through their Government and their Cooperatives. Nationalisation and the acquisition of part ownership of several companies were steps in the direction of severing the links between the local working classes and the international bourgeoisie. The Arusha Declaration also stated that socialism was incompatible with the presence of capitalist elements, in contrast with 'African Socialism' which has as one of its major tenets the advocacy of co-existence of private and public ownership.
5. Leopold Senghor, Nationhood and the African Road to Socialism (1960), see English translation, 1962, p. 78. The most relevant passage reads as follows: 'Our plan will include three sectors: a socialised sector - agriculture; a mixed sector - public utilities and companies with mixed economy; and a free sector. The latter - banks, commerce, industry - will itself be oriented towards the objects of the Plan and, to a certain extent, controlled... The mixed sector will preferably comprise transport and energy - within the limits of our possibilities, of course. As for agriculture, we are fortunate that it has traditionally been socialistic, because of the communal nature of Negro African Society.['] Glimpses of an interesting critique of this position by the Ugandan, John Kakonge, are to be found in B. Onuoha, Elements of African Socialism, (1964), pp. 89-92. At that time, Kakonge espoused Marxist ideas.Utopian socialists promoted models in which capitalists cooperated with their workers in the new society. They sometimes assigned a major initiatory role to the bankers. Senghor's proposal was to socialise agriculture, to establish public utilities as a mixed sector and to leave banks, commerce and industry to capitalist enterprise.5 The sum total of these arrangements would be 'African Socialism'. In so far as contemporary theory and practice of Ujamaa in Tanzania does allow for private enterprise, this is well understood to be transitional, an entirely different concept from that of the permanent co-existence of capitalist and supposedly socialist relations within the same society, and one that has been implemented in every socialist revolution from 1917 onwards.
Both feudalists and capitalists are cited by the Arusha Declaration as enemies of socialism. The former had their place in the scheme of things in Africa before the coming of the Europeans, while the latter came into being as part of the process by which metropolitan capitalist society was remodelling colonial society (wittingly and unwittingly) along lines of stratification and exploitation. The Indian businessmen in East Africa were the closest representation of a locally resident bourgeoisie, and it is no accident that they were the most affected by the measures of expropriation behind the nationalisation of foreign-owned property, i.e. by the Acquisition of Buildings Act, 1971. Thus, both ideological statements and government policy pinpointed that within Tanzania there were capitalists and feudalists standing in opposition to the workers and peasants. The Arusha Declaration does, in the same breath, make a rather unsatisfactory distinction between urban and rural Tanzania as representing exploiters and exploited, respectively. It is in Socialism and Rural Development that stratification in the countryside is also acknowledged and a realistic assessment is made of African communal society, as it was and as it is becoming.
Having extolled the virtues of 'traditional' African living in Africa, Socialism and Rural Development proceeds to identify both its inadequacies and the fact that communalism as a way of life and a value system has been constantly eroded under the pressure of African involvement in capitalism. Because of cash-crop farming in particular 'the old traditions of living together, working together and sharing the proceeds, have often been abandoned'. In place of the old Ujamaa patterns, there was a growing gap between those who owned and hired labour and the landless who offered their labour for hire in order to survive. In this context, Mwalimu Nyerere predicted that, unchecked, such a development raised the spectre of most of the peasantry becoming a 'rural proletariat' working for the minority landed class. This observation attests to the fact that the theory underlying the modern version of Tanzanian Ujamaa identifies contradictory forces within the nation as well as the direction for change that must result from the interplay of such forces. Marx and Engels attacked 'Proudhonism' because, among other things, Proudhon saw socialism as being based on independent petty producers of the artisan class. But changes in technology by the mid-19th century had convincingly demonstrated that the artisans were doomed to extinction by machine production and the universalization of capitalist relations. Of course, the peasant is also a petty producer and has actually been eliminated in large parts of Western Europe. The question as to whether there is a possibility of using peasant production as the basis for a socialist state has been raised in many debates, and its resolution depends upon the local and international political economy of the time. Before tackling this issue in the specific context of Tanzania, it is enlightening to pursue briefly the debate on 'Peasant Socialism' as it was conducted in the rather similar context of late 19th century Russia.
Like contemporary Tanzania, 19th century Russia was an exploited semi-colonial sector of the international imperialist economy. Unlike Tanzania, Russia had experienced fully matured feudal relations and was becoming capitalist and industrialized from its own internal dynamic, quite apart from the intrusion of Western European capitalism. Nevertheless, there had persisted under feudalism and embryo capitalism certain communal forms of organisation among the peasantry - namely, the obshchina or mir (village communes) and artel (artisans' cooperatives). Russians of a socialist or anti-capitalist bias contemplated a socialist society that was qualitatively different from that envisaged by their counterparts in industrialized Western Europe. They argued that Russia could avoid the maturing of capitalist relations within its national boundaries and move directly to a brand of socialism where the dominant social class was not the industrial proletariat but rural peasants, living a life that was not far removed from the communalism that preceded enserfment and capitalism. Obviously, there is a great deal in Tanzanian Ujamaa that is analogous to the pre-occupations of the Russians in question, who are known to posterity as Populists.
In the 1870s and early 1880s, late in their veteran careers, Marx and Engels were asked to comment on the possibility of Russia avoiding capitalism. In a letter to K. Kablukova, a Populist, Engels viewed favourably the opportunity presented in Russia 'to be able to appeal to the people's thousand year old natural urge to associate, before this urge is wholly extinguished' (emphasis supplied). Marx expressed the opinion that the rural community was the mainspring of Russia's social regeneration, but that in order that it might function as such, one would first have to eliminate the deleterious influences which then assailed it from every quarter. The vital condition for the successful building of socialism in Russia on the old communal base was speed to forestall further inroads on surviving collectiveness. In addition, it was essential that revolution in Russia be preceded by or immediately followed by the outbreak of a workers' Revolution in an industrialized part of Europe. This point is made in the introduction to the first Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto published in 1877 and again at some length in Engels' statement On Social Relations in Russia (1882). Some years later, Engels reaffirmed the contention as follows:
I would say that no more in Russia than anywhere else would it have been possible to develop a higher social form out of primitive agrarian communism unless - that higher form was already in existence in another country, so as to serve as a model. That higher form being, wherever it is historically possible, the necessary consequences of the capitalist form of production and of the social dualistic antagonisms created by it, it could not be developed directly out of the agrarian commune, unless in imitation of an example already in existence somewhere else.
As seen in the above, Marx and Engels dealt with the stages of human social development in a much more flexible manner than they are usually given credit for. They are of course insisting that the movement from communalism to feudalism to capitalism to socialism is a movement from lower to higher forms, with implications for the volume and efficiency of production and the satisfying of human needs. But they are not implying a single mechanical line of historical progression, and they actually deny this in the course of the discussion. In a comradely letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881, Marx explained that his description of the historical inevitability of the foundation of the capitalist system was expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe. Four years earlier, he had made the same point with rather greater asperity in reply to a detractor, Mikhailovsky, who insisted on misreading Marx. Firstly, Marx reminded his readers that the chapter on primitive accumulation in Das Kapital does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy. He then proceeded to show that the given historical sketch of Western Europe might be applicable to Russia if Russia continued to move in the same capitalist direction as Western European countries; for in that case Russia could not succeed without first transforming a sizeable number of peasants into proletarians. However, Marx vigorously disavowed any intention of using his model of Western Europe to provide a historical-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself.
14. I.A. Potekhin cites an instance to the effect, which arose out of a discussion of 'African Socialism'. See William Friedland and Carl G. Rosberg (eds), African Socialism, (1964). In all fairness to Leopold Senghor, it should be noted that his hostility to Scientific Socialism is seldom ill-informed, and he shows his awareness of points of clarification such as those raised in the letters [Marx to Zasulich, March 1881.] and [Marx to the editorial board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski, November 1877.].Although Marx completely disowned the proposition that a people must move to socialism via capitalism, it is understandable that bourgeois academics ignore this and interpret Marx to mean exactly what he said he did not mean.14 But even self-styled Marxists have also made it appear that Scientific Socialism can be arrived at only on the basis of an advanced proletariat within a given country and hence only after capitalism has held in sway that country for a lengthy epoch, in precisely the same manner as Western Europe.
As far as Russia was concerned, the discussion by populists and Marxists about avoiding capitalism turned out to be one about a non-realisable hypothesis. Marx and Engels feared that the process of stratification in the countryside would continue unchecked. Information reaching them from the late 1870s suggested that Russian communal forms were becoming shells which only hid the new exploitative relations of capitalist society. Towards the end of his life, Engels regretfully concluded that the obshchina should be treated as a dream of the past. A fine chance had been missed, but reality had to be faced, for capitalism was being built in Russia on the labour of landless peasantry turned proletariat. A few years later, when Lenin made his in-depth analysis of The Development of Capitalism in Russia, he convincingly demonstrated that the capitalist process was far too advanced to think in terms of by-passing that stage. In other words, the creation of a rural proletariat and of landlord farmers which Socialism and Rural Development was interested in avoiding in Tanzania had already occurred in Russia by the turn of the present century among the peasants themselves - in addition to the continued existence of feudal and bourgeois landowners.
Even after it became clear that internal and external factors were hastening the final decomposition of Russian communal forms, some theorists still clung to the idea that Russia could build socialism on the model of an old commune. Only at this point were they eschewed by Scientific Socialists as propagating Populist Utopianism. For instance, in 1890, Engels declared that the Populist, Danielson, was beyond hope, in spite of prolonged ideological exchange and correspondence to clarify the conditions under which Russian communalism could be revived. For purposes of an analogy with Tanzania and Africa, what is crucial is that the founders of Scientific Socialism seriously and enthusiastically contemplated a variant of socialism very much akin to Ujamaa, and they indicated the conditions under which it might be realised. The most important requirements were, firstly, that the 'traditional' forms should exist in real life and have some social vitality, and, secondly, that international conditions should be favourable owing to a socialist breakthrough in some part of the world. For Africa, the fulfilment or nonfulfilment of these conditions needs to be examined.
An effort has already been made to underscore the idea that for Marx different paths to socialism did exist, precisely because of varied experience of movement from one social phase to another. It is of some value to the history of philosophy to keep the record straight on this issue; although one is primarily concerned not with establishing Marx's correctness but rather with confirming the truth of the observation that the movement of different peoples through history has had significant variations. This could be illustrated within Europe with regard to the contrast between Eastern and Western Europe. As far as Asia is concerned the social stage parallel to that of feudalism in Europe bore sufficient peculiarities to the categorised separately as 'the Asian Mode of Production'. Most relevant to the African continent is the debate on a possible 'African Mode of Production'. With the exception of parts of the Middle East and Egypt, neither Asia nor Africa had slavery as a distinct social system, and African societies had very little servitude outside of the context of capture for export. From African communalism, the evolution was in a feudal or quasi-feudal direction, and communal forms persisted even in the most stratified societies. Ruling elites in empires as large as those of the western Sahara still maintained their authority through the heads of communities rather than through contractual relations with individual peasants.