Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Revolution or Pragmatism from a Modest Malawian View Point

This essay will touch of several separate topics. The aim will be more to show how nuances of various topics have a role to play within the broader and tumultuous realm of politics. At this point in my life, I am convinced that we all are involved in politics, even when we have said to ourselves that we are apolitical, and this position is what currently drives me towards the conclusions I often make.
 
Revolution is a powerful word which captures the process of achieving the idealisms of the various groupings and factions that play their part in the dense political sphere. The dominant canons or discourses around which the definitional essence of that word are derived are embedded at least in the contemporary setting in a Marxian sense albeit no always within the Marxian conclusions. That sense is that revolutions entail that moment in which there is the realization of a critical mass of some awareness whose content manifests in a focused overthrow of an undesirable status quo. However, beyond the massive manifestation of that awareness' content upon the status quo is an undefined utopian space in which the shattered and yet remnant symbolisms of the previous order are arbitrarily designated into unequivocal, incoherent and generally unsystematic definitions about what a utopian existence actually should look like. This existentialist vacuum is in my interpretation what necessitates the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Marxist intellectual chapters, as well as an inherent intra-social resistances within the matrix of social actors generally towards revolution. More correctly, revolution isn't the object of disdain in and of itself - rather the lack of definitional exactness with regards to singular subjects following the overthrow of a status quo is.
 
An automatic solution therefore to this problem is a benevolent dictatorship or the dictatorship of Fidel Castro or more exactly, the dictatorship ascribed by a consenting proletariat. A dictatorship that is somehow geared towards total emancipation upwards even to the level of aesthetics, while maintaining a strong reformist position towards what are admittedly, even in Marxist and Hegelian doctrine themselves, the fundamental roots of all epiphenomenal human existence including aesthetics. This is after all the very reason why there is a lengthy and hostile critic of ideology within those same writings in which ideology is the manifest pacifier of endemic economic arrangements. Nonetheless, the imposition of a dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise, remains nothing more than an balancing stone to a very complicated question, and that question is, after the revolution that involves hundreds of thousands of people, from where then shall we draw a definition from which a utopian existence could be designed and implemented. This is precisely where Africa as a continent finds itself. Unlike its sister continents who through the processes of intentional but still nonetheless organic development (and I don't not say development to mean progress) have through the passing of time arrived at varying crystalized definitions of what life on those continents is about, and subsequently approximations of what is worth preserving. In Africa, the dilemma is ominous because the revolution is said to have already happened at independence; a revolution of political independence and self-determinism which however, within the very same decades of self-rule, had become subservient to the broader concerns of limiting economic circumstances. Or, to put it differently, circumstances that warranted self-rule in conjunction with continued economic dependence. This is of course for the simple reason that after independence was gained, the remnant symbolisms of State-ism and capitalism (or communism as its fierce opponent) had translated the revolutionary language pre-independence into ideals only realizable or imaginable within the precincts of the language or discourse of State-ism itself. It was either that as stepping stone for the political sustainability of the definitional dictatorships or the abyss of "the lack of utopian definitions".
 
Residually,  therefore the constitution of power which was required to reform or revolve that African condition remained in tact because of the absence of definitional exactness. In turn, this translated into a strange commitment to dictatorships even when the economic might of the State was clearly not within the control of the dictator per se but in the arm of the donating colonial-mother. The African revolution therefore in a practical terms was a vision whose viability was defined externally, but experienced and suffered internally - and to this effect, entirely experienced in a continuous juxtaposition with an abhorred and yet desired other. The definition granting powers of African executive branches defined only the modalities for maintaining the rights to twist and spin African definitions within an already prevailing language of dependence and its subsequent longings, while their true abilities to transform tangibly the lives of those they claimed those definitions were for was housed in London, or New York, or Berlin or other far flung places of African Longing. This tension, I claim in this essay, is visible today. But I also make another claim that may startle those who are often too militant about apportioning blame upon imperialism; that African dysfunction within such an arrangement is collegially of our own making.
 
I proceed as follows; even within the discourse of revolution, our continent's thinkers and politicians tussle over redistributing wealth, expanding services so as to engender socio-economic development, and other reforms that would materially - that is in terms of global/western definitions of wellness - improve the standing of African people. Revolution is thus laced everywhere within prevailing global definitions of wellness or betterment. There is also for example the naïve taking for granted of self-evident qualities and conditions that would universally speak to all of humanities desires and aspirations which are also fundamental universal doctrines about humanity which are western. They are the same self-evident criteria that are for example used to justify international acts of aggression and war. Now, the point is not to push for an alternative because clearly even if such an alternative could be produced, the argument I have presented so far attests to precisely the opposite of such an alternative. It seems clear that within our own dysfunctional marauding we are in fact all aspiring to - due to the historical outputs of our, call them, earlier induced or otherwise dispositions at independence and before - approximations towards the Western ideal anyway. And this is unsurprising because the Utopia, arrested by economic limitations, enabled by benevolent developed states whose acts of donation animate with life the wills of our political actors on our continent and our overall projects, are themselves imaginably the ideal. In this case they are donating as ideals, or financing the realization of an approved ideal. For we all know that violated ideals lead to aid cuts which often collapse political definitional powers eg. Malawi.
 
I find therefore that within that mess, arguments pertaining to what is essentially human in its origin or what is imbued as a consequence of an imposing other may be important to some, but my outlook is typically more modest. Firstly, we have a utopian desire that cannot be defined in any manner that could render it as a universal concept that reflected all aspirations. Our historical experience itself denies this. The utopian definitional vacuum only necessitates the need for a balancing benevolent dictatorship which masquerades as benevolent precisely because it sits in the vacuum of the absence of a definition. And lastly, we have the status quo rampant with currents of discontent and suffering, opulence and luxury, all of which a defined presently in various but nonetheless owned or conscious approximation towards western standards or antagonisms against those same western standards. Our own experience thus seems to force us to see the West as the only viable, resented or loved, alternative in the context in which a revolutionary future presents only a utopia with a void existentialist definition. So I ask, what then is the viable basis for any revolution anyway if its eventually is precisely the antithesis of the very aesthetic freedoms - or languages - we as Africans seek to protect; definitions which are blanketed in African rhetoric about a lost glory in a Western vocabulary.
 
I have many times before stated that such questions shouldn't have to matter at all if indeed we - and as our historical record has shown - have defined ourselves presently within the very things we claim to hate. Of what use therefore is this perpetual commitment to towards revolution when, even at this present time a pragmatic programmatic would be sufficient to heal the wounds of the unjustly suffering who predominantly already identify their betterment in terms of a Western vocabulary? The self-made aspect of our African problems have therefore more do with our own reluctance to see our circumstances for what they are, to be honest about the languages in which we speak or articulate them, and to move decisively to absolve them within a set of terms that are already present and rampant within the prevailing order - terms that are unfortunately western such as the State itself or even Citizenship. Visions about paradise are great, but Africa must come to terms with the reality that we are limited by what we can actually do. And that limited space of what we can do is much more fulfilling for all of us than what has been the case so far since independence in this longing for a utopia that we only know as a paradise but cant define in any tangibly existential manner.
 
The language that systems that function objectively within our own borders; that do not shield malpractice and offenders; and that attempt to symmetrically treat all citizens of States on the singular basis of their citizenships indeed echoes calls for a modernization of Africa. But we ourselves can begin to find the additional merits and demerits arising out of our own commitments to actualize a system of State to its very logical conclusions in manner that would permit us to transcend the western nostalgia, and arrive towards a cultural dictum that would define our own experiences. This would liberate us from this perpetual juxtapositional existence of always snaking around the central monolithic ideal in our ambivalent love for and hate of the West. The dysfunction brought about by high political powers designated to act as revolutionary prophets - or the quest for subsequent prophets following the pursuit of a new utopia - without the means to express their visions in economic terms and let alone in any fair terms always leave nations open to the appetites of those central personalities of power. Subsequently positions Africans to see the West as the ideal. Internal cohesion is therefore the first step towards any kind of decolonization effort. Revolution for me remains nothing but a revolutionary idea. What we need is Pragmatism - within the already rampant discourses, which follows into an honest realization of where we are, accounts for how we see ourselves there, and what practical affordances and limitations we face to better ourselves within those already rampant concepts.