An Open Letter to African Trotskyists
A guest article by African Yeast
What I want is Marxism and Communism to be placed in the service of the Black peoples — and not the Black peoples in the service of Marxism and Communism.
— Aimé Césaire, Letter of Resignation from the French Communist Party, 1956
AFRICAN YEAST
Introduction
We have observed, with growing concern, a recurring friction in our ranks between those who approach socialist politics through the lens of Pan-Africanism (a camp we belong to) and those who approach it through what we call – for reasons we shall explain in the next section – a “Supermarxist” framework.
This tension has manifested, repeatedly, in squabbles, in group purges, in call-outs, in the conflation of legitimate Pan-Africanist analysis with sensationalism on one end and a strict, colour-blind internationalist analysis as a psyop on the other. As we have said before, and we shall repeat here again, this is the result of wrong applications of theory that, left unaddressed, will continue to reproduce exactly this kind of rupture within our movement.
Addressing it seriously, then, requires that we first identify its roots. This pamphlet is the product of that undertaking. The argument itself is organised as follows. First, we identify the strand of thinking in question and explain why we borrow the label “Supermarxist” to describe it. Second, we locate the principal error that generates everything else: the misidentification of concrete material conditions. Third, we characterise the observable tendencies this error produces. Fourth, we enumerate the specific charges this tendency levels against Pan-Africanism and refute each one dialectically. Lastly, we close by appealing that we not only apply material analysis to concrete material conditions but also ourselves, in the form of self-analysis.
Who is a Supermarxist?
“Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi, je ne suis pas marxiste”
English: “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist”
— Karl Marx, reportedly to Paul Lafargue
The term “Supermarxist” is one we have borrowed from Opoku Agyeman, who used it as a critical label for those African Marxist scholars at the University of Dar es Salaam (the so-called Dar es Salaam School of African Marxologists) whom he accused of placing rigid, orthodox Marxism above the concrete concerns of Pan-African liberation. His contention then was that these scholars had subordinated the specific material realities of colonised and neo-colonised African peoples to a universal class struggle framework derived from 19th-century European capitalism and had done so with a dogmatic certainty that brooked no modification.
It is 2026, not 1978, yet Marxism — properly applied to African conditions today — remains just as indispensable. It is precisely because we take Marxism seriously that we do not use the term “Supermarxism” lightly. What it names is, in effect, pseudo-Marxism: the mechanical, copy-paste application of a framework as though it were a closed set of eternal laws, rather than a method of analysis demanding fresh application to each concrete condition.
The contemporary Supermarxist tendency we address is, more specifically, Trotskyist-Internationalist in character. It holds that:
The primary contradiction in any social formation is always and everywhere class.
Race is a superstructure — a distraction from the real motor of history.
The correct organisational form is the international workers’ party oriented to the formal proletariat;
Pan-Africanism is a form of bourgeois nationalism that obscures class divisions and serves the interests of the African petty bourgeoisie;
Anti-imperialist governments and movements that do not conform to this form are suspects to be opposed or at best withheld solidarity from.
These positions, taken together, constitute not just an intellectual posture but a political programme. And it is the political consequences of such a programme, its correctness, or lack thereof, when measured against the concrete conditions of Africa today, that we shall contest in the next sections.
What is the Supermarxist error?
The concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the living soul of Marxism.
— V.I. Lenin
Now that we have more context on who a Supermarxist is, let us identify their common mistake. Every charge, every tendency, every practical error we shall address flows from a single basis: the misidentification, or even outright dismissal, of the concrete material conditions of Africans.
Comrades who, by instinct or methodology, fall into this camp tend to defend their position by invoking the scientific character of Marxism as a shield: “Marxism is scientific — therefore you cannot apply it wrongly. To accuse us of dogmatism is itself unscientific.” They have often used this specific analogy: “You cannot apply Einstein’s theory of general relativity incorrectly, because it is scientific.”
Such an analogy, on closer examination, in fact, proves our point rather than theirs.
Einstein’s theory is valid precisely because it maps onto the actual constants and conditions of this universe. The speed of light is constant not because Einstein assumed it but because reality imposed it on Einstein through patient, often painstaking empirical observation. That grounding in material reality is what makes the theory scientific. Remove that grounding and apply the equations while assuming a different speed of light, and you get results that are precise, rigorous, and even internally coherent but completely wrong.
Theory + Correct Empirical Conditions → Valid Conclusions
The scientific method is such that if you get the empirical conditions wrong, the conclusions are wrong even if the theory is perfect. Such is not a failure of the theory but a failure of application. And it is a failure that is entirely possible, common, and dangerous.
This is not hypothetical or hyperbole; it happens, demonstrably, even within natural science. Newtonian mechanics applied to Mercury’s orbit gave wrong predictions, not because Newton was wrong about the domain, but because the empirical baseline was incomplete. And before Lister finally convinced the medical establishment of the need for antiseptic practice, there was Ignaz Semmelweis – the Hungarian doctor who discovered and demonstrated the relationship between unwashed hands and childbirth mortality and was denounced and institutionally destroyed by colleagues who were absolutely certain that their scientific training meant their conclusions could not be wrong.
The certitude of mastery, divorced from concrete observation, has always been the most dangerous form of error. Marx himself understood this. The correct identification of material conditions was not, for him, preliminary to the analysis — it was the analysis. He identified real constants of capitalism as he observed it: surplus value extraction, class contradiction, capital accumulation, and so on. But he derived these from specific empirical conditions — those of industrial England and Europe more broadly: a European proletariat, pre-financialised capital, societies without racial-colonial structuring.
He did not begin with theory and apply it to reality; he began with the reality of European capitalism and built theory from it. By the time he wrote Capital, he had spent years in the British Museum studying actual factory records, actual wage data, actual production statistics of nineteenth-century England. His theory is scientific because it emerged from such concrete material investigation.
Marx said as much clearly: when Russian comrades asked him whether his analysis of primitive accumulation applied universally to all societies, he replied, in his 1881 correspondence with Vera Zasulich, that his analysis was limited to Western Europe and could not be mechanically transplanted elsewhere. A man who wrote that cannot honestly be invoked to justify applying his English analysis to 21st-century Nigeria.
Walter Rodney, throughout his works (Decolonial Marxism, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Groundings With My Brothers, etc.), demonstrated with meticulous empirical rigour what Marx’s method actually produces when applied to African conditions: an analysis in which race and colonial extraction are not superstructural appendages but the very mechanisms of capital accumulation.
Rodney was not abandoning Marxism — he was doing what Marx had done, beginning with the concrete conditions of the society he was analysing and building theory from them. Amílcar Cabral made the same methodological point in practice. In Towards African Revolution and elsewhere, Cabral insisted on what he called a “return to the source” – a rigorous, empirical investigation of the specific social formations, class structures, and productive relations of each African society – as the precondition for any correct political line. His concept of the petty bourgeoisie “committing class suicide” and his account of the role of culture in a people’s struggle for liberation were not theoretical oversights. They were concrete responses to the concrete finding that Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau lacked an industrial proletariat large enough to serve as the classical revolutionary subject.
Do comrades see what we are saying? Is the suggestion, then, that Cabral’s return to culture — a people’s own identity and historical memory mobilised in their struggle against imperialism — was somehow non-Marxist? That Rodney, in centring race and colonial plunder, had strayed from Marxist analysis? If so, then it is the Supermarxist, not Rodney or Cabral, who has parted ways with Marx’s own method, which began always with the concrete and built theory from it. The Supermarxist inverts this entirely; they begin with theory and subordinate African reality to it. That is not science. It is dogma.
They may respond, “But the fundamental laws of capitalism — exploitation, surplus value, class struggle — are universal and timeless; we are applying those, not the specific 19th-century instance.” Fine. Then account for South Africa under apartheid, whose legacy persists today: a Black and a white mineworker, both formally proletarian, both owning nothing but their labour, neither with land nor capital. Reduce class to bare exploitation, to ownership versus non-ownership of the means of production, and the two men occupy the same position. Concrete material reality tells us otherwise. The white man supervises; the Black man is confined to unskilled work, however talented he is. The Black man is paid a fraction of the wages paid to the white man. The white man goes home; the Black man goes to a shack. One man’s floor was the other’s ceiling, in the same mine, on the same shift. Peter Abrahams’s Xuma witnessed this floor and ceiling, their naked dialectics, in Mine Boy. His experience is proof enough for us: that the underground, for him, regardless of competence, was his permanent station.
Which analysis is scientific — the one that abstracts away this form of exploitation with a colour line running straight through it, or the one that accounts for it?
A universal law that cannot explain a central feature of African material reality is not being applied scientifically. It is being applied selectively, which is the definition of dogmatism.
The most dangerous version of this is not the crude, uneducated misapplication. It is the misapplication by the most studied, most theoretically sophisticated comrade — because the deeper the mastery of theory, the more convincing its misapplication sounds (especially to them) and the more consequential its effect. The usual certitude of the Supermarxist goes: I have the right formula, demonstrably so; therefore, my analysis must be correct. But the most studied comrade in the room is not automatically the most correct one.
Correct analysis requires two things equally: the soundness of the theoretical framework and an accurate reading of the concrete material conditions. Get the material conditions wrong, and no degree of precision in Marxist theory will save the analysis from being false.
Following Rodney’s and Cabral’s example, then, let us be even more precise about exactly where the Supermarxist misreads the African material condition — in three specific and consequential ways. First, they apply the framework of industrial capitalism to a continent whose insertion into capitalism was never industrial in the classical sense.
Africa was not incorporated into global capitalism as an industrialising partner; it was incorporated as a continent of total extraction — of enslaved labour, of raw materials, of land. The capitalism that came to Africa was racial capitalism from the outset: a system in which race was not an ideological varnish on an underlying economic logic, but the very mechanism through which that logic operated. Land dispossession was organised by race. Labour coercion was organised by race. Political exclusion was organised by race. So to analyse capitalism in Africa since first contact, specifically its offshoots in the form of extractivism and imperialism, without accounting for how race constitutes it is misguided.
Second, they apply the classical proletariat-bourgeoisie framework to class formations that do not fit it. The African comprador class is not a classical national bourgeoisie; it did not develop organically from merchant capital to industrial capital. It emerged largely as an administrative and intermediary layer within the colonial and neocolonial state apparatus, its wealth flowing not from the exploitation of domestic productive labour and resources in general but from rent, commissions, contracts, licensing fees, and resource concessions — the various forms of surplus that accrue to a middleman in a relationship of structural dependency it did not create and cannot seriously control. Given this, it has no objective interest in developing national productive forces. This transforms the analysis of internal class struggle entirely.
Third, the overwhelming majority of the African labouring population does not fit the orthodox proletarian schema. Peasants, smallholder farmers, informal urban workers, petty traders, market women, artisans — these are the actual proletarians of Africa, and their relationship to capital is mediated, indirect, and structurally different from that of the classical factory worker. The urban poor of Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Kinshasa are not Marx’s classical proletariat; they are people expelled from the land by primitive accumulation and structural adjustment, surviving through informal trade, subsistence, and occasional wage labour. Orienting African socialist politics exclusively toward the formal trade union movement and the small industrial working class — which in many African countries constitutes a relatively privileged stratum compared to the peasantry and informal poor in general — is an unsound classification of the revolutionary subject itself.
These are examples of dogmatism. And it is precisely the representative tendencies which are offshoots of this error, what comrade Mao called “book worship”, that we shall now turn to characterising in their observable forms.
What are the Supermarxist tendencies?
Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head.
— Amílcar Cabral
1: Class Reductionism
On the racial question, the Supermarxist’s first move is hardly that of genuine engagement. It is evasion. When confronted with a concrete observation — say, a comment on the persistence of global anti-Black racism or on the predatory character of European expansion both before and after capitalism took root in that society — the Supermarxist does not engage the claim on its merits. He reaches instead for a counter-example that explains it away without addressing it: “This is just the bourgeoisie dividing the working class.” “The Japanese did atrocious things too – the Rape of Nanking, their own imperialism – were they Europeans when they conquered their fellow Asians?” And imperialism’s favourite cousins: the Benin, Zulu, Oyo, Bakongo empires were expansionist too. “African societies practised slavery. Spare me the Kum Ba Yah about Ubuntu and Omoluwabi, please” — as if these invalidate the observation or experience in the first place.
Let us reference a particularly telling conversation we were privy to recently. A comrade — by his own admission a Pan-Africanist socialist — observed that European culture carries a supremacist character that predates capitalism and is not guaranteed to dissolve even with the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat in that society, should this were to happen. For this, he was denounced, accused of Black supremacism, of being a closet Hitler.
Such is the Supermarxist inclination. To caution against “black racialism and supremacism”. After all, the historical and dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels does seem to suggest that race and, in particular, racial ideology is superstructural and, therefore, a social construct. But a correct and critical materialist analysis of the African condition, as we have stated earlier, would show that you cannot be structurally racist or supremacist without institutional power to enforce that hierarchy.
A Black man can be many things; he can be prejudiced, chauvinistic, yes, even a bigot. What he cannot be, within the present structure of global capitalism, is institutionally racist-supremacist, because that structure grants him no institutional power to disadvantage any other race. It is similar to accusing a propertyless worker who parrots bourgeois sentiment of thereby being bourgeois. A worker without capital remains a worker. We are materialists, after all, for crying out loud! A poor African peasant who dreams of exploiting his countrymen’s labour or looting their resources is, at best, a dreamer. He might be a miscreant or even a thief, but definitely not a comprador.
This is the same false equivalence, restated more abstractly, that underlies the broader Supermarxist position on race: that since white supremacy organises around race, Black anti-racism that organises around race must be guilty of the same error. That logic holds only if one ignores who constructed racial categories, for what purpose, and in whose interest they continue to serve. Race was not invented by the African people it was used to subordinate. It was the institution through which a specific global system of extraction was organised, legally encoded, and violently enforced. An ideology of domination and the legitimate response of the dominated to that ideology are not the same phenomenon, and conflating them is disingenuous.
We have put the deeper danger of this tendency to a Supermarxist comrade before, and it is worth repeating here, as it is politically the most dangerous tendency of all: are the working people of Africa to discard a shared and common experience of racial-capitalist exploitation – an experience that gives them both the reason and the material basis for solidarity across the very borders that colonialism imposed and that neocolonialism now vigorously maintains? Is it not precisely this racial-historical consciousness, grounded in class analysis rather than opposed to it, that arms the toiling class with an account of why and how it is being exploited, and of why it must organise transnationally, continentally, and internationally rather than within the narrow national terms that suit the comprador class? So you see that asking that this form of consciousness be abandoned for the sake of class purity does not purify the class and its struggle; it only serves to disarm it, to blunt its edges.
2: Idealistic Internationalism
The Supermarxist invokes proletarian internationalism as the framework within which African liberation must be organised and treats Pan-African solidarity as false consciousness — a lesser, nationalist substitute for genuine class internationalism.
The historical record of actually existing proletarian internationalism is sobering to say the least. At the moment of its greatest test — the outbreak of the First World War — the internationalism of the Second International collapsed almost entirely, as workers of the imperialist countries voted to kill one another on behalf of their respective ruling classes. The AFL-CIO actively collaborated with CIA operations in Africa and Latin America throughout the Cold War to suppress radical labour movements. The French Communist Party opposed Algerian independence at critical junctures of the liberation war. Ho Chi Minh learnt this lesson firsthand from the French left in the 1920s. The abstract international working class did not liberate Russia, Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, or Guinea-Bissau.
Comrade Adebayo once put the matter even more pointedly to us: consider a Palestinian worker in Gaza and an Israeli worker in Tel Aviv. The latter, in a great many instances, builds the very bomb that will destroy the former’s home, family, and existence. What form of proletarian solidarity can realistically be expected between them on the basis of their shared class position alone in their different societies? The abstraction “worker” does not abolish the concrete fact that one man’s labour is a cog in the very machinery of the other’s destruction.
Lenin’s own conception in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, explains why. The super-profits extracted from colonial and semi-colonial labour made it structurally possible for the ruling classes of imperialist countries to bribe sections of their own working class with a share of those super-profits. This creates a material stake in the continuation of imperialism among broad sections of the Western working class — a stake that proletarian consciousness does not simply dissolve, because consciousness is a downstream effect of material interests and thus, can not simply override it on demand.
By insisting on this form of internationalism as the only viable path then, the Supermarxist in effect asks African workers to wait for a Western proletarian solidarity that the material structure of imperialist capitalism makes unlikely. If we wait for such internationalism, we will wait forever.
The unity of the oppressed should be a precondition for any internationalism worth its salt. Pan-African solidarity – the building of political economic solidarity among oppressed African peoples and states – on the other hand, is not a retreat from internationalism. It is the only form of internationalism that corresponds to the actual material conditions of African peoples at this historical moment, and it is, paradoxically, what is best positioned to usher in a genuine internationalism eventually.
3: Historical Formalism
“This is what Lenin did in 1917.” “This is what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Socialism or Barbarism, and I quote.” “This is what Trotsky argued for in Coyoacán.” Historical and international revolutionary experience is treated by the Supermarxist as a prescription, a blueprint rather than as an instructive precedent (a guide to action, not a plan of action), to be understood given its own concrete conditions and learnt from, not mechanically followed.
The irony is that every successful revolution departed significantly from the archetypes that preceded it. The Bolshevik revolution did not replicate the Paris Commune. The Chinese revolution was not a replica of the Bolshevik one. The Vietnamese liberation struggle was not a replica of the Chinese one. Each succeeded in part because its leadership conducted a concrete analysis of its concrete situation and built a political line from that analysis, not from historical precedent.
4: Undemocratic-Democratic Centralism
Criticism, say in the form of raising the race question, or questioning the applicability of a European framework to African conditions, is met not with theoretical engagement but with accusations of being unscientific or unmarxist (you need to study), of being a tool of the bourgeoisie, a reactionary, a Hundenyinist, a nationalist, etc. As a consequence, the Supermarxist insulates itself from scrutiny by making scrutiny itself politically suspicious.
This is a profound contradiction. Democratic centralism, as should be practised by any genuine Marxist-Leninist organisation, requires the fullest internal debate before a political line is determined. A tendency that forecloses such debate through political accusation is not practising democratic centralism. It is practising a form of uncritical indoctrination antithetical to the revolutionary tradition of Marxism-Leninism.
5: Dialectical Dogmatism
At the root of several other tendencies is this one: a failure to correctly identify what comrade Mao called the principal and secondary contradictions of a given social formation at a given historical moment. In the African context, the Supermarxist identifies the principal contradiction as the internal class struggle between the African proletariat and the African bourgeoisie and treats imperialism as secondary, or even tertiary.
This is an error of the first order. As we have already established, the African ruling class is a comprador class ontologically — and a comprador class, by definition, has no objective interest in developing the domestic productive forces. Its wealth does not come from production. It comes from its position as gatekeeper between the African economy and the global one. You cannot fight this class without simultaneously and primarily fighting imperialism. The two are structurally inseparable.
The Supermarxist treats the comprador class and imperialism as two separate, independent parties who happen to find themselves in an alliance — a marriage of convenience one that internal class struggle alone could, in principle, dissolve. But the comprador is not imperialism’s partner. It is imperialism’s creature. The comprador class does not merely benefit from imperialism, the way a contractor benefits from a client. The two do not merely coexist. They constitute each other. The comprador has no existence without imperialism. Strip the imperial relation away, and there is no comprador left at all.
This misidentification produces another related error: a distorted conception of who the revolutionary subject actually is at this stage of history. Where the ruling class is comprador — where the dominant mode of accumulation is extraction, rent, and intermediation rather than domestic production — the mode of production itself takes a specific character, and the working class it generates takes a specific character as a consequence. Classical Marxist analysis names the proletariat as the revolutionary subject precisely because it is the class whose productive forces capitalism simultaneously develops and exploits and whose collective position within production equips it to seize and reorganise that production.
But what of a mode of production that is barely oriented toward developing productive forces at all? Dangote, the most visible figure of Nigerian capital, does not manufacture in the full sense of the word — he assembles and distributes, with the productive core (technology, capital goods) sourced elsewhere. Moniepoint, the most dominant of the new fintech generation, processes financial transactions; the POS hardware central to its operations is imported, and its own CEO has acknowledged the company struggles to fill engineering roles locally, sourcing critical technical capacity from abroad. So, even the most dynamic examples of Nigerian capital are not, in their structural logic, incentivised to develop domestic productive forces, because their returns flow not from production but from the middleman position itself. The surplus accrues at the intermediary layer and flows outward. The workers this system produces are shaped accordingly, within a mode of production organised around extraction and gatekeeping rather than domestic production.
What, then, is the correct revolutionary subject in this formation? We do not yet have sufficient data to specify its precise configuration — that is a question for the concrete political work ahead. What we can establish here is the fundamental: that the revolutionary subject in Africa is necessarily particular, different from the one theorised out of 19th-century European industrial capitalism or even that of 21st-century American domestic capitalism, and this difference is a consequence of the mode of production itself.
In the same vein, where and what is the place of antagonism, since not every internal class distinction needs to be fought the same way at the same time? The principal struggle remains, throughout, the struggle against imperialism — yet the Supermarxist collapses every domestic capitalist formation into one undifferentiated bourgeoisie, to be opposed identically and all at once. But a comprador class, bound to imperialism by the mutual constitution we have just established, is necessarily different from a genuinely national bourgeoisie oriented, however partially, toward developing the domestic productive forces rather than serving imperialism. As comrade Mao insisted, struggle is constant, but antagonism — open, all-out conflict — is only one form it can take. Whether a contradiction is antagonistic depends on the concrete stage and conditions, not on which class it happens to belong to. To treat one category as if it fit every class formation alike, without accounting for this difference, the difference in relation to imperialism (which is primary at this stage) is, again, to get the material conditions wrong, and to get the material conditions wrong is to get everything else wrong.
So we ask the Supermarxist to not confuse the reality they live in with the ideas in their head. Look at the particular history before applying the universal formula. Look at which part of a struggle is actually primary, the part without which the others cannot be sufficiently addressed. Look at whether the two things you assume are separate are in fact propping each other up. Look at whether this particular class relation, at this particular moment, calls for antagonism or a provisional alliance. Just look!
6: Institutional Fetishism
Marxism’s foundational methodological commitment is to look beneath form to material content — it was precisely this move that Marx applied to bourgeois democracy, showing that its formal equality, the universal franchise, the rule of law, the independent judiciary concealed real class domination. The Supermarxist has learnt this thoroughly in the abstract and promptly inverts it in practice. They evaluate political formations by a single standard: whether they constitute, or are led by, or are accountable to, a formal dictatorship of the proletariat in the classical Marxist-Leninist sense. Formations that do not meet this standard are suspect, excluded from progressive solidarity, regardless of their material content or concrete political practice.
The result is that a contemporary government like that of Traoré’s is condemned as a junta — full stop. That it expelled French military forces, moved to assert mineral sovereignty, challenged the CFA franc dependency, and broke with ECOWAS as an instrument of French — none of this is treated as material evidence of progressiveness.
It is worth stating plainly what this means by the Supermarxist’s own standard: the governments of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom — which hold regular elections, maintain independent judiciaries, and conform to liberal-democratic norms — are, by this logic, more progressive than Traoré’s. That the Supermarxist critique lands in precisely the same political position as the French foreign ministry, the EU, and the Western liberal press should give any well-meaning revolutionary a pause.
7: Anti-Anti-Imperialism
The Supermarxist opposes capitalism (and imperialism) in the abstract and in principle, but in practice, the CFA franc arrangement, the Sahel base network, the funding of insurgencies against governments that step out of line — these are simply the way things are. Just like the weather, they are a given. Imperialism will always do what it has to do; that is its driving logic. What comes into sharp focus instead is the anti-imperialist: its form, its credentials, its distance from the theoretically correct revolutionary subject. The leadership is petty-bourgeois. The party is not a vanguard. The government is a junta. A principled reason is always found.
And yet it is these governments that are expected to meet the threshold of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as though they were governing in a laboratory rather than against the full, organised weight of an imperial system feverishly working to destroy or co-opt them. In essence, the anti-imperialist government’s internal contradictions are treated in isolation, rather than as secondary to the principal contradiction arising from imperialism itself. The Supermarxist does not ask what is possible within the concrete field of forces that actually obtains. They ask why the actually existing anti-imperialist does not look like the theoretically correct one — and, finding the answer unsatisfactory, sanctions it on those grounds. The imperial system, meanwhile, requires no such justification. It simply continues its predation.
What Do Supermarxist Charge?
We shall now state, as fairly as possible, three specific charges the Supermarxist levels against Pan-Africanism, specifically the practical conclusions that follow from the tendencies above and the principal source of the misalignment this pamphlet was written to address.
1: Class is primary; race is superstructural.
Class is always and everywhere the primary contradiction in any social formation. Race, nationality, and culture are superstructural — produced by the material base but not themselves constitutive of it. The working class has no country and no race. To organise politically around race or continental identity is therefore to organise around an illusion, a product of bourgeois ideology that serves only to divide the working class along lines that benefit the ruling class: the African bourgeoisie is a capitalist class exploiting African workers and peasants, and the struggle against it is a class struggle like any other; Pan-Africanism obscures this internal class antagonism by substituting continental solidarity for class solidarity and is therefore a form of false consciousness. The task ahead is to build working-class organisation within each African state to challenge the ruling class that governs it. Organising around race fractures the working class along the very racial lines capital exploits, where a clean class line would not.
2: Pan-Africanism is a retreat from proletarian internationalism.
The correct internationalism is solidarity across national lines with the global working class. Pan-Africanism substitutes racial and continental solidarity for that class solidarity. African workers should build ties with workers in Europe, North America, and elsewhere who share their class interests; to retreat into African solidarity is to accept the fragmentation imperialism has imposed and to abandon the possibility of genuine international working-class movement.
3: No dictatorship but the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Traoré’s government and governments like it in Mali and Niger, as well as those of Iran and China (theocracy and pseudo-workers’ party), are authoritarian and unaccountable; that is, not led by or accountable to the working class. Whatever their anti-imperialist rhetoric, they represent one form of class domination substituting for another. Genuine progressives should not extend solidarity to strongmen or non-workers’ parties simply because they adopt anti-imperialist language. The correct standard is workers’ control of the means of production.
Our Response to the Charges of the Supermarxist
There is nothing holy or sacred about theories or hypotheses for us, they serve us only as instruments.
— V.I. Lenin
We shall now attend to each charge in turn and demonstrate why, in the concrete material conditions of Africa today, each one fails – both as a theory and as a guide to practice.
1: On race and class.
Because race originates as ideology rather than as a natural fact — that is, in the Engelian sense, superstructural in its genesis and therefore socially constructed — the Supermarxist concludes it cannot underpin racial-capitalism itself. But that a thing starts as superstructure does not mean it is inconsequential. Money is a good counterexample.
Money, too, has no basis in nature. It is a convention, invented, agreed upon, backed by nothing but collective belief and, state power. There is nothing about the physical universe that requires that a piece of paper, or a number in a ledger, command food, land, or another person’s labour. It commands these things only because enough people, via the coercive machinery of the state, agreed to treat it as though it did. Yet nobody draws from this the conclusion that money is, therefore, “immaterial”, a mere idea separate from the real business of production. To the contrary, money organises production, determines who eats and who starves, and structures entire institutions, precisely because, once constructed, it becomes part of the relations of production themselves.
Race is no different in this one respect. Its genesis, we agree, is historical and ideological (there is no biological basis for it); but once manufactured and enforced by the state, it ceased to be merely superstructural and became constitutive of the economic base itself. Virginia’s slave codes of 1705 fixed African and African-descended people, and no one else, as chattel in law. Kenya’s White Highlands were reserved for European settlers by decree, with African communities confined to native reserves, their land alienated and undervalued, on the basis of race. That legal dispossession is what made cheap African land and, later, cheap African labour available to settler capital, and now cheap tea exports in the first place. The same pattern is evident in policing, in wage arrangements that pay a Black and a white worker differently for the same task, in property statutes that permit one race to own and forbid another, in visa regimes, among many others within and across states.
Genesis and function are different questions. The notion of the state itself demonstrates this in practice even more so. The state, too, is a construct — borders are drawn by treaty and by war, not by nature, and as Africans, we are aware of this quite well. The lines partitioned at Berlin in 1884 are the ones African states and African revolutionaries have had to organise within and against ever since. Lenin called the state “a machine for the oppression of one class by another” — arising only once class antagonism became irreconcilable, and destined to wither away once it dissolves. It is no more natural or permanent than race is.
Yet no one sees a contradiction in naming their party after the state they organise within or against: the Communist Party of the USA, the Communist Party of Britain, the Communist Party of China, the Vietnamese Communist Party,the Naija Marxists. They organise at the scale of the state while knowing full well it is a bourgeois form, and knowing full well capitalism is a world-system that exceeds any one of its borders. Nobody says that organising along state lines obscures the class question, even though the state is exactly the kind of construct the Supermarxist claims race to be. Capitalism must be contested where and how it actually constituted, and today, that remains chiefly within and across the “state”. We ask only that race be granted the same courtesy already extended to the state.
Granting that race functions as structure rather than mere superstructure, therefore, the charge that organising around it is “false consciousness” collapses, because false consciousness is when a class has a mistaken grasp of its material interests, and Pan-African consciousness is, on the contrary, the correct understanding of an exploitation that is organised continentally and racially. It is not a substitution of race for class — it is the recognition that in the global capitalist system, race has a function, just as class.
A working class that has become a class for itself is a working class with an identity and every act of class consciousness is, in itself, an act of identity formation. One does not abolish class by refusing to organise as a class; one organises as a class, wields that identity as a weapon until the conditions that necessitated it are gone at which point the identity dissolves with them. And, just as you need class to destroy class, you also need race to destroy race. One does not abolish race by refusing to organise when racialised. One organises against the structure that made race a fixture, and for as long as that structure persists, so does the racial question.
And who, in any case, commoditised race in the first place? Not the African. It was by capital’s own hand – the same process, the same act of primitive accumulation, that commoditised labour. Race and labour were enclosed together by the same mechanism of racial capitalism for the same purpose: to extract maximum surplus from Africans. It was the original enclosure, a structure of domination created and maintained by one group at the expense of another. One side built and upholds the hierarchy while the other has spent over five centuries responding to it.
Black anti-racism is therefore not a prototype of white supremacy but its antithesis. It is the response of the oppressed Black to the structure of their oppression—and the form of that response necessarily takes the shape of the oppression it is responding to. If you are oppressed as Africans — your land taken as African land, your labour exploited as African labour, your humanity denied as African humanity — then liberation is necessarily organised around the recovery of the humanity, land, and sovereignty taken on those terms. The oppressed have no obligation to dissolve the identity through which they are oppressed as a precondition of resisting that oppression. That demand is not Marxist. It is an imposition that only serves the oppressor.
None of this means class is unimportant or that racial solidarity is sufficient on its own. The internal class contradictions within African communities are concrete and must be identified and struggled with. The African comprador class does indeed exploit racial solidarity when it suits them. But the answer to that exploitation of racial politics is not to abandon racial solidarity. It is to give that solidarity its correct revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist content. The task is not to dissolve Pan-Africanism into a colourblind class politics. It is to give Pan-Africanism its correct class character — and to insist that in the African context, you cannot correctly analyse class without accounting for race or race without accounting for class. They are inseparable in the African material condition of today, and any such attempt to separate them is itself politically fraudulent.
2: On internationalism.
Granting the historical record set out above — the Second International’s collapse in 1914, the AFL-CIO’s Cold War collaboration with the CIA, the French Communist Party’s opposition to Algerian independence, among a myriad other instances — the charge that Pan-Africanism is a retreat from internationalism inverts the actual relationship between the two. It is not Pan-Africanism that has failed to produce reliable international solidarity; it is proletarian internationalism, repeatedly, at exactly the moments solidarity was made requisite.
This is not a rejection of the idea of internationalism but its proper situation, a recognition that internationalism among the oppressed has to be built on actually existing shared material interests – the kind a Palestinian and an Israeli worker manifestly do not share by virtue of class position alone and the kind African peoples, bound by a common history of racial-capitalist extraction, manifestly do. In this sense, Pan-Africanism is not an obstacle standing in the way of internationalism. It is the only internationalism Africans currently have the material basis to build and the precondition for any wider internationalism that might one day be built upon it.
This should not be surprising. Capitalism itself did not become the dominant mode of production the moment capitalist relations first appeared; those relations existed within feudal society for centuries. Socialism, and the internationalism attendant to it, should be expected to follow the same historical course, if not at the same historical pace. Without internationalism everywhere, there is, in any material sense, no internationalism anywhere – only its ideal, awaiting the conditions of its own actuality.
A socialist state surrounded by a capitalist world does not stand outside that world but within it, and inside it, it must trade on capitalism’s terms, defend itself militarily, accumulate foreign exchange, and compete technologically, among a great many other pressures no socialist state can simply opt out of by declaration.
Applied to these concrete conditions, historical materialism tells us that as long as socialism exists only in non-dominant parts of the globe, the dominant relationship between states remains international competition, not international cooperation regardless of ideology. Even a genuinely socialist state would have interests that conflict with proletarian internationalism as an ideal.
What the Supermarxist mistakes for a betrayal of internationalism is, more precisely, the chasm between internationalism as an ideal and internationalism as it actually exists in the world today. What our people would call “audio” internationalism. Beyond the ideal, concretely, for genuine internationalism: let the workers of the Global North seize the means of production in their own advanced countries first, and we shall stand with them in that undertaking, for their victory is as much our interest as theirs. That is all.
3: On revolutionary purity.
Granting that the “material”, not “liberal”, is the correct socialist standard for evaluating a government, the charge against governments like Traoré’s fails to pass the Marxist acid test. It is, in other words, a liberal charge using Marxist pretensions.
The Pan-Africanist-Marxist standard for evaluating a government is material and structural: a political force is progressive to the degree that it advances the concrete liberation of the African people from imperialist extraction and creates the conditions for genuine sovereignty — economic, political, and military. By this standard, the correct question to ask of Traoré’s government is not whether it constitutes a dictatorship of the proletariat. It is whether it is materially advancing or retarding African sovereignty against the concrete forces arrayed against it. And those forces must be accounted for.
Anti-imperialist governments do not exist in a vacuum. They are a product of a global capitalist system of overwhelming dominance — one that controls the international financial architecture, the terms of trade, the military balance of forces, and, as we have shown, the very class structure of the states they govern. They inherit the accumulated structural deformities of colonialism and neocolonialism: economies organised for extraction, state apparatuses designed for intermediation, and working classes shaped by those same conditions. They arise, moreover, without the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and organised working-class movement whose existence the Supermarxist posits as the precondition for any progressive politics.
Comrade Lenin himself, confronting analogous conditions in the colonial world, was unambiguous: the nationalist, the anti-imperialist — the “strongman”, if you insist — who is genuinely breaking with imperial domination must be regarded as objectively progressive at this stage of the struggle, whatever the formal limitations of his political organisation. The question that matters is always the concrete material direction of the movement, not the purity of its organisational forms.
Critique and solidarity, in this conception, are not antithetical. They are dialectical. The Pan-Africanist engages with the internal contradictions of anti-imperialist governments from a position of solidarity with the anti-imperialist project itself — precisely because weakening that project serves imperialism, not the African masses. The Supermarxist on the other hand, treats them as antithetical — solidarity or critique — and in choosing critique from such a position of neutrality, functions in practice as opposition. That is the crux of the matter. We say a government is progressive if it is materially anti-imperialist. The Supermarxist says a government is progressive only if it is a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Conclusion
Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.
— V.I. Lenin
We began by establishing that Marxism is scientific only insofar as it is grounded in the actual, empirically observed material conditions of the society it analyses — that Marx’s own method proceeded from concrete investigation to theory, never the reverse, and that he said as much explicitly when he restricted his own historical account of primitive accumulation to Western Europe.From this it follows that any application of Marxist categories to Africa must itself begin from Africa’s concrete material conditions rather than from a template drawn from 19th England or 21st-century China, for instance.
We then established what those concrete conditions actually are: that race in Africa is not a superstructural distraction from class but is constitutive to it. It was the primary mechanism by which African capital, land, and labour were originally organised and are still, today, materially structured; that the African comprador class is not a classical national bourgeoisie with an interest in developing domestic productive forces but a transmission belt whose wealth depends on the very relation of dependency that a national-liberation politics would abolish; and that the majority of Africa’s labouring population is not the classical factory proletariat of industrialised nations but a peasantry and informal working population produced by primitive accumulation and structural adjustment. From this it follows that politics organised around the classical proletariat-bourgeoisie axis, blind to race and blind to the comprador character of the local ruling class, is not applying Marxism correctly to Africa; it is applying it incorrectly, however precise its formulae appears.
We then showed, from the historical record itself, that proletarian internationalism, as actually practised, has repeatedly failed to produce reliable solidarity across the imperial divide (metropole-periphery) and that Lenin’s own theory of the labour aristocracy explains why a material stake in imperialism, not a failure of consciousness, is what has repeatedly stymied that solidarity at critical moments. From this it follows that a politics which asks Africans to wait upon such solidarity as their primary strategic orientation is asking them to wait upon something the material structure of imperialism itself makes improbable — and that a politics built instead upon the material interests Africans concretely share with one another is not a retreat from internationalism but the only internationalism presently available to be built upon.
We then showed that the correct materialist standard for judging a government is not its resemblance to a formal dictatorship of the proletariat but the concrete direction of its movement against, or in alignment with, imperialist extraction and domination — because no government in Africa today possesses, or could plausibly be expected to possess, the vanguard party and organised industrial working class that the formal standard presupposes, and because that formal standard, applied consistently, would rank the imperial cores themselves above their anti-imperialist opponents in the periphery. From this it follows that solidarity with anti-imperialist governments, extended critically and without illusions about their internal contradictions, is not a departure from the Marxist method but its correct application and that withholding solidarity on formal grounds converges, whatever the intention behind it, with the position of the imperial powers themselves.
Put these four theses together, and only one political line makes sense. If race is constitutive of African material conditions rather than superstructural to them; if the African ruling class is structurally dependent on imperialism rather than autonomous; if proletarian internationalism cannot be relied upon as the primary strategic axis; and if the correct standard for judging anti-imperialist forces is material direction rather than formal purity — then the primary contradiction in Africa today is not, principally, the African worker against the African bourgeoisie considered in isolation. It is the African people, across their internal class fractions, against imperialism as the global system that produces and sustains that very class structure.This does not abolish the internal class struggle but correctly subordinates it, since that internal structure cannot be transformed while the external relation that produces it remains intact. And the political form adequate to a continentally organised system of extraction can only be a continentally organised politics of liberation: Pan-African in scope, Marxist in method, building the political economy of unity among African peoples as the necessary foundation for any genuinely sovereign socialist path.
This is the line the concrete analysis of concrete conditions produces. We close, then, with an appeal to all of us, ourselves included. As we embrace Marxism as a tool of analysis, we must constantly endeavour to turn it upon ourselves. Self-criticism — or more precisely, self-analysis — is essential to our struggle. What conditions do our theory, our proclivities, and our practice engender? Do they, accidentally or otherwise, further consolidate the exploitation of the toiling, proletarian African masses in reality — or do they move toward their liberation? Do they frustrate needlessly the efforts toward a united front, a unity so badly required at this historical moment? Who do these tendencies benefit in the grand scheme of things?
These are questions we must always ask of ourselves, our movements, and our own habits of thought. When we do, it becomes evident that Supermarxism is a disservice to the struggle ahead — and we must disabuse ourselves of it, comrades.
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This article was originally published on African Yeast where it generated significant attention and came to the attention of multiple team members at The Spearhead. Immediately after Barra Hart and David Hundeyin amplified it through their social media accounts, the African Yeast Substack account was mysteriously taken down for an unstated “violation of spam & phishing policy”, and the article was seemingly scrubbed off the internet including the Wyback Machine.
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