Socialism and Communism as theory and praxis before Marxism

For the hardcore Marxists out there my goal is not to tear down the legacy of Marx or to minimize his contributions to economics and history — a hopeless task that we can leave up to capitalists — we can examine the historical context in which he arose.

So it should be stated that Marx didn’t invent socialism nor did he discover it. Young Marx read the term “socialism” used by French author Pierre Leroux (1797–1871) — generally credited with coining the term — or the German Lorenz von Stein (1815–1890) while he was doing journalism in his early years.

French philosopher Victor d’Hupay (1746–1818) called himself a communist author around 1785, thirty-three years before Marx’s birth, He wished to transform the ideals of the Enlightenment philosophers into practice. His colleague Nicolas-Edme Rétif (1734–1806) even used the term to describe a form of government.

In the 17th century, Gerrard Winstanley and Thomas More, who published Utopia in 1515, were Britons who wrote about civilizations that had the community before profit, unknown privately-owned property and controls on manufacturing means.

Socialism in Indigenous Ways

Tribes of Turtle Island (America)

By 1841 the Iroquois order had been established by the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan. Morgan’s Iroquois League (1851) has noted effects on Marx. In The Origin of the Family (1884) Engels lauded the Iroquois “communist” constitution while Marx and Engels continued to refer to indigenous culture as “primitive communism.” The Iroquois Confederation borrowed from the Union of the Thirteen Colonies long before their day.

The Iroquois originally lived near Lake Ontario and along the Mohawk River in New York State. Around 1600, five tribes — the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas — banded together to form a confederacy. … These people called themselves “Haudenosaunee” or “people of the long house”.

— Africa

The African communal societies had their structures and value systems. The structures had to do with the organization of production, distribution, consumption, law and order, etc. The value system, on the other hand, is related to the cultures that emerged from the above structures and institutions. A good feature of the value system of African communal societies is the socio-cultural attribute of Ubuntu, which indeed was prevalent in all of these societies. Ubuntu can best be described as an African philosophy that places emphasis on ‘being self through others’. It is a form of humanism that can be expressed in the phrases ‘I am because of who we all are’. Nyerere had posited that “In our traditional African society, we were individuals in the community and the community took care of us. We neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men” (Julius 1968, p. 56). The rise of states in precolonial African societies, ipso facto Atlantic slavery, and the complexity of productive forces, gave birth to what Walter Rodney has called proto-feudal African societies.

Leopold Senghor in his own assessment claimed that “Africa’s social background of tribal community life does not only makes socialism natural to Africa but excludes the validity of the theory of class struggle” (Senghor 1964). In the absence of the theory of class struggle, Julius Nyerere had pushed forward the idea of an extended family or family-hood system, known as Ujamaa in Swahili.

Just as Columbus didn’t discover America, nor did Amerigo Vespucci even though it’s named after him. America was already there, and just because its inhabitants weren’t called “Indians” yet, they weren’t invented when Europeans first beheld them. Nor was it a coincidence that Thomas More set Utopia in the so-called New World, and wrote it just a few years after the first Indigenous “Americans” were being dragged back to Europe and put on display. Nor is it a coincidence that Marx’s writings on what termed primitive communism occupied his mind all his life. The 1880–1882 Ethnological Notebooks containing his study of the ethnologists' Lewis H. Morgan (1818–1881), John Phear, Henry Maine, and John Lubbock remain his last view on the subject. Morgan sourced property rights in primitive societies to personal relationships and Maine to impersonal forces, but to Marx, the source is from the collective. Marx basically accepted Morgan’s view on the ethnology of primitive peoples. He studied primitive groups for the origin of civil society and the state and he traced the production mode from these primitive groups to modern society.

NB: These societies weren’t primitive but given the climate of the time in which these philosophers are writing it was the accepted term at the time.

Socialism: A new avenue to exploit black people?

The laws of gravity are called Newton’s laws, in America, but you can’t think that Newton invented that a body falls at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared — Newton cannot invent that. The best we can say about Newton is that he was an astute observer, that’s all. If I’m in Timbuktu, doing any experiment with the laws of gravity, I’d come to the exact same conclusion that Newton came to.

Karl Marx cannot invent socialism”. “It’s a universal truth. The best we can give him is an astute observer. Because any man, any woman — if I’m sitting in the desert of Libya, in North Africa, looking at the relationship between capital and labour, I will come to the exact same conclusion as Karl Marx: that wherever capital tries to dominate labour, there will be a ruthless struggle against capital, by labour, until labour comes to smash capital and dominate it!” — Kwame Ture

Ture points out that the Tunisian economist and historian Ibn Khaldun wrote Muqaddimah in 1377, laying out the principles of modern economics and using many of the same terms as Marx including “surplus labour,” the “origin of the state,” or the “origin of private property.”

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) and Karl Marx (1818–1883) are separated by five centuries of history and two civilizations and yet they exhibit some very important similarities.

For example:

1. Men as social and political beings According to Ibn Khaldun men are political by nature. This is because, by necessity, men organise themselves into groups and co-operate together in order to meet their needs. One man on his own cannot provide for all his needs, but when men get together and co-operate they produce more than enough for their needs. Ibn Khaldun states that even to provide for a day’s food, such as a small amount of wheat requires ‘grinding, kneading, and baking. Each of these operations requires utensils that can only be provided by three different crafts. He further states that even if we assume that a man could eat unbroken grain he still needs to cultivate and harvest the crop, which are impossible tasks for one man to perform. However, when men come together and cooperate they satisfy the needs of a number of people much time greater than their own. Production of surplus leads to the creation of civilisation. Similarly, according to Marx, the ‘individual is a social being’ and to be human is to have consciousness and “Consciousness is… from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.” Men, in order to meet their requirements for food, drink, clothing and shelter, co-operate with each other to produce them. By satisfying these essential needs, they create new needs and increase their numbers. Through these social activities, men achieve consciousness.
2. Dialectics Given his deep knowledge of ancient Greece, it would be very surprising indeed if Ibn Khaldun was unaware of Aristotle’s concept of dialectical change. He himself wrote a book on Aristotle for the education of a son of a Christian king in Spain, when a small part of the country was still under Muslim rule. However, it is almost certain that he was unaware that ‘asabiya’ itself was a dialectical concept. This is a fair deduction because he made no mention of dialectical change in relation to the concept of ‘asabiya’. The concept of dialectical change is also a strong element in Marx’s theory of history. Dialectics is a central element in both Marx’s and Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history because both the ‘productive forces’ and ‘asabiya’ follow its laws. However, although dialectics plays the crucial role of bringing continuous change in both theories, Marx’s dialectical concept differs from Ibn Khaldun’s fundamentally. It can be said that they operate on completely different, or even opposite, planes. Ibn Khaldun’s dialectical concept of ‘asabiya’ operates at the mental level, while in contrast, Marx’s dialectical concept of the ‘productive forces’ operates on the material plane. Why do I consider ‘ asabiya’ and ‘productive forces’ to be dialectical concepts? I do so because any form of change is said to be dialectical if the change comes about in such a way where an internal element develops within a particular phenomenon, first challenges it and then negates it. Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ‘asabiya’ gives rise to a state (political government), and by this very act, initiates a process that brings about its death. In Marx’s theory, the concept of the ‘productive forces’ establishes a particular social system, and by this very act creates a force which, by necessity, resists its further growth without any success. The main difference between the two dialectical concepts is that, while the child (the state) of ‘asabiya’ manages to destroy it first and then is itself subsequently destroyed by this destruction, the child (the social system) of the ‘productive forces’ unsuccessfully resists the further growth of ‘productive forces’ and destroys itself in the process. According to Marx’s theory, there is no prevention of the growth of the productive forces. In contrast, Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ‘asabiya’ comes into existence, grows, reaches its peak, stagnates, declines, and then dies.

“Most of the ideas that we call foreign are oftentimes nothing but mixed up, reversed, modified, elaborated images of the creations of our African ancestors, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, dialectics, the theory of being, the exact sciences, arithmetic.”

“Consequently, no thought, no ideology is, in essence, foreign to Africa, which was their birthplace.”

— Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism

When all is said and done it’s not difficult to demonstrate that Europeans took the idea of socialism from what they observed in traditional and Indigenous cultures. They named these ideas and elaborated on them in print, transferring centuries — or millennia — of knowledge to a popular new medium, just like filmmakers did in the 20th century or podcasts and audiobooks do today. Indigenous ways were not protected by copyright. Marx was at the forefront of this observation, elaboration, and analysis.

Socialism’s compatibility with the Indigenous way of life

Our Ancestors (pre-colonization) didn’t accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid, intimate collective and individual relationships of trust. In times of hardship, we did not rely to any great degree on accumulated capital or individualism but on the strength of our relationships with others.

When Adam Smith proclaimed the benefits of capitalism, he argued that economic transactions are most beneficial when participants act in their own self-interest. He thereby gave currency to the widespread myth that throughout history humans have acted primarily out of concern for their own well-being. This falsehood persists, whereas socialism is weakened by the widespread assumption that it’s only one or two hundred years old at most.

When anthropologists and economic historians pointed out the importance of giving in the past or demonstrated that numerous civilizations, past and present, had incorporated cultural codes which prohibited avarice and contempt for profit, the capitalists changed the line of thinking and argued that these populations had to be uncivilized or barbaric.

Socialism and Communism: Carried by the Third World

Some of Marx’s ideas contradicted socialist revolutions during the 20th century. Marx predicted that the most advanced levels of capitalism would follow a proletariat revolution in the most advanced capitalist countries. Instead, Russia and China went from feudalism into socialism instantly. Socialist revolutions, not to mention a few, are casting additional questioning on this element of Marx’s thought in other countries that have not been archetypal advanced capitalist civilizations such as Algeria, Ethiopia, Laos, Nicara-Gua, South Yemen, Tanzania or Vietnam. We also can draw close to Frantz Fanon’s invitation to ‘stretch Marxism’ as a way of understanding the particularities of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. It is posited that events such as decolonisation across the postcolonial world have been central to the evolution of global capitalism and should be centred within Marxist analyses of global politics.

The past is our only source of scientific knowledge. Just as the fossil fuels that we extract from the earth and burn for energy are composed of living beings who preceded us, so our concepts of social organization, politics and economics rest on analyses of past societies. In this sense, we all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.

Marx revered and deeply understood Indigenous politics. One of the most famous thinkers who was devoted to connecting Indigenous and socialistic methods in Latin America, José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism(MAS) of Bolivia gives only one illustration of the continuity of this objective today. Arab philosophers like Michel Aflaq have shattered socialism from its apparent moorings in Europe. Unfortunately, such works and many more are seldom traduced in English and have no perspective in Europe and North America, but are hushed from the people’s talk.

Socialism: White man's ideology or universal concept?

Kwame Ture described Pan-African socialism as a “universal concept,” an objective that “was stopped by capitalism.” Ture argued that “the very values of socialism come from communalism,” practised everywhere for centuries.

“We don’t need to read Karl Marx or Adam Smith to find out that neither the land nor the hoe actually produces wealth,” wrote Julius Nyerere, “and we don’t need to take degrees in Economics to know that neither the worker nor the landlord produces land… We must, as I have said, regain our former attitude of mind — our traditional African socialism — and apply it to the new societies we are building today… The European socialist cannot think of his socialism without its father — capitalism! Brought up in tribal socialism, I must say I find this contradiction quite intolerable… We, in Africa, have no more need of being ‘converted’ to socialism than we have of being ‘taught’ democracy. Both are rooted in our own past — in the traditional society which produced us.”

Or, in the words of Felipe Coronel, “I think that we have to acknowledge something: our people’s revolution doesn’t begin somewhere in the early to mid-1800s, after Marx and the rest of them came out with this ideology, that other people then came and either endorsed or added their own particular stamp to… We didn’t need a European guy to come to us, to the ‘dark jungles’ of Latin America and Africa, and explain to us the ‘complex’ concept of sharing. We knew what collectivism was for thousands of years. It’s the way that all of us stayed alive.”

Marx’s criticism of capitalism is fundamental to the development of an emancipatory socialist future. Our job is to remove all remnants of settler colonialism and empower all those across the world, regardless of their background or culture, who are fighting against imperialism and exploitation. The fight for dignity and for liberation from iniquity in Zimbabwe and Palestine, Syria or India, Turtle Island or Cuba isn’t fought in the name of a White European invention, but for a universal ideal.