I am a Social Innovationist
Duma Boko | Monday September 12, 2016 15:20
Now we can have us some interesting, serious and scholarly discussion. Interesting question asked by this young comrade, isnt it? The question is made all the more interesting by the fact that it is difficult, well-nigh impossible to appreciate what the defining attributes of a Marxist are.
It seems to merely lie in the mouth of anyone who has paged, even cursorily, through any one of the classical texts of Karl Marx, Friederich Engels and/or V.I. Lenin to pronounce themselves Marxists, Marxists-Leninists, Leftists or some such appellations. Well, I have read these classics and more. I remain a social innovationist in the world of ideas.
I acknowledge fully, that classical European social theory, represented mainly in the ideas of Karl Marx, offers revolutionary insights. Its animating message is that societies are real and imagined; the social structures are our artefacts, they are our creation. We made them. We can reimagine and remake them. The Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico, makes the same proposition. I acknowledge another fact, though. This classical European social theory, especially in its Marxian version, suffers certain fundamental flaws that limit its force and compromise its potency. There are three main such flaws. We call them fallacies or illusions.
The first is the illusion that history presents us with a closed list of institutional structures and arrangements being feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. There is no such closed list. History offers no such blue-print! This is the illusion of false necessity or the typological fallacy.
The second is the illusion of indivisibility. It suggests that each of these fixed institutional structures or ‘modes of production’ in Marxian parlance, amounts to an indivisible system that must stand or fall in its entirety, and must, at some point, be wholly supplanted and replaced by another equally indivisible system.
On this logic feudalism can only, and must, be replaced by capitalism which must, in turn, be replaced by socialism until the attainment of communism. It is this lingering illusion of indivisibility that leads many “leftist” thinkers and claimants to believe that there are just two kinds of politics. They think on the one side is the revolutionary substitution of one fixed system by another and on the other side the reformist humanization of a system. This fallacy blinds us to the fact that change can be structural but nevertheless piecemeal, fragmentary, gradual and experimental. There are no fixed and frozen formulae but innumerable pathways. And politics does not bifurcate into revolution or reform!
The third illusion is that we transition between these ‘stages of social development’ through predictable and predetermined paths. In a word, that there are immutable laws governing the succession of these indivisible alternatives. This is the determinism fallacy.
I, for one have been grappling with these issues since my youth. In my presidency of the BNF I have outlined my vision and a partial answer to some of these issues. If you go through all my speeches at various party fora, I have danced with and engaged some of these issues. I have foreshadowed them in some manner in every statement I have made. And I have invited debate. Not just superficial sloganeering. Serious, informed debate that seeks to guide and inform praxis.
Sadly, for most if not all ‘Marxists’, politics has merely become a contestation of orthodoxies; a blind contest of grand narratives.The founders of the BNF were astute not to shackle the organisation to any of the prevailing smelly orthodoxies, or any of these illusions. They gave it sufficient dynamism to chart its course guided by prevailing circumstances and opportunities.
And, dear comrades, I recently raised the ideology question at our conference in Good Hope and our congress in Francistown. I sought to provoke some soul searching. The Congress came back and said: Social Democratic Programme. Isn’t that what our Constitution says? That, folks is the soul!
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