Authors: Norman Rush
Mating (13 page)
MBAAKE:
To my comrades
pronounced comraids in African English
I am reminding that our comrade speaker has said Oh yes, socialism, it is the same as knitting with oars, at one time. You can do it but not for very long at all and the garment leaves something to be desired, he has said. As well, our comrade speaker
reading from a card now
has said, and not long time ago, not 1968, Oh yes, capitalism is strangling black Africa and socialism must bury her. He has said this.
DENOON:
So I did. I said it to provoke. But just let me advance to number two.
Number two is that under socialism you are going to have to lay aside money to buy technology, ever newer and better technology, from the market states. And forever. Because under socialism unfortunately there is no invention, that is to say innovation. If you ask why this is so, I have to say I can’t tell you. I have guesses about it. But this inventing of new things is very low in all non-market societies, not only in socialism.
So if you want the latest thing you have to steal it or buy it or do without.
But at the level of the government, we discover, our rulers would rather not do without, especially if what is on offer is a better kind of weapon. And you can be sure the West is going to keep on creating newer and more gorgeous guns and baubles. I hope we all can see that.
MBAAKE:
If you can please say about all these
intrinsical
troubles about socialism more timeously, so that we can have our voice as well. If you don’t mind to. Because we can say that you are just telling us some claptraps. Because we know that socialism is coming, never mind about what some makhoa tell us. Because Africans have always been socialists, in our villages we were socialists when
Karl Marx was not yet born, not even less his grandfather. We are socialists by our blood.
Mbaake, rather than continuing to have to stand up to intervene, now went to lean fulltime against the wall.
BOSO VOICES:
Hyah, hyah!
DENOON:
Well, this is a moment of temptation for me. I
could tell.
I would love to talk about African socialism and was the village a truly socialist institution, ever. I
willed him not to.
Very many untruths have been written on this subject.
In my mind I
begged
him to stick to his checklist. It was partly because I was interested.
Three is a cost you will never see in a Boso pamphlet and is the cost of suppressing possessive individualism. One could say socialism is an annual, but possessive individualism is an iron perennial. This is a cost superadded to the costs of dealing with general crime, which has not gone away yet in any socialist country. I am referring to the cost of suppressing a novel class of activities designated as economic crimes, such as giving people the death penalty for speculation or hoarding. All crime, but especially this new kind of crime, was supposed to fall away when capitalism was overthrown and the new socialist man was allowed to flourish. But there is no new socialist man, no homo beneficus, and never was. Of course when anyone complained to Lenin about the harsh blows being dealt to his own people his answer was that you could not make an omelet without breaking some eggs. So but now the omelet is cooked and his successors are still breaking eggs. Number three.
I hope you believe me on this, if on nothing else. Note that I am not saying that making cooperative economic institutions work is impossible because we have to rely on our friend homo economicus to sustain them. Well. I am just saying you can do it, but you have to be wise as serpents.… But now number four.
Four. Whatever idea you might have—one might have—about giving Botswana a socialist industrial economy, remember that it,
and all of Africa, is an agricultural economy. Show me a socialist country and I will show you a net food importer. Even now you, we, are living on gift food from the West. I notice that Boso is talking about collective farms and ranches. But believe me that the application of socialism—that is, making farmwork into wage labor—has been everywhere a disaster. Industrial socialism is one thing. Socialism in agriculture—the special case of the kibbutz excepted—is nonworkable. The last of the many group ranches set up in Kenya at independence closed down last year. If you choose only one single proposition that I have made tonight to study up and refute, choose that one.
One reason you’ll have to import food and pay cash for it is that as a socialist country you’ll only get gift food if your people sink to the point of starvation as they have in Mozambique.
Five was a mess. He couldn’t get it schematic enough, and during it some people got bored to the hilt. My notes, which I made when I went home that night, say that there are two ways to extract the social surplus—confiscatory via the state, or individual and voluntary, whereby people sweat and compel themselves to save. I think the point was that the rate of capital accumulation was much lower in systems where you have to rely on only the first method and that this will express itself in the need to rent capital in perpetuity from the more fecund market economies.
There was something related about the adaptive slowness of socialist systems in general, with efficient units subsidizing inefficient ones to an unconscionable degree. Exit and entry of firms was not controlled by efficiency, and since people would have political entitlements to jobs, the inefficient units would accumulate and encumber the economy. In this phase I was listening to the voice more than the man.
I caught Grace looking at me. I must have been being somewhat rapt. I think I caught a gleam of triumph in her eye before she looked away.
His wrap-up was good and was to the effect that in a nutshell orthodox socialism, which one was welcome to choose, was a system that was slower, more rigid, and more fragile because decisionmaking was centralized and there couldn’t be any risk-spreading, and had extraordinary recurrent costs not characteristic of the economies of its socalled rivals. And it was a system that would in all probability be permanently
dependent
on its socalled rivals. And even though the distribution of benefits within
socialism was more equal—its sovereign virtue—there was a long-run tendency to inequality that could be argued about. And there was what he had said about the incompatibility of socialism and agriculture to remember.
There was a mixture of for and against outcries. Somebody from the Russian embassy was suddenly present and I gather was expected to say something—but he was shrugging. He had been out of the room, unfortunately. Mbaake was all set. In fact he was making the up and down waving motion Batswana use when they hitchhike instead of putting their thumb out, which conveyed sarcasm.
DENOON:
I just want to say—
More cries, including “Ow!” and the word “Menshevik.”
DENOON:
Comrades, I just want to say—
If I search my mind for permanent marks I left on Denoon rather than vice versa, this is one I can be sure of: I made him stop overusing the intro
“I
just this” or
“I
just that.” I convinced him that it was always taken as preapologetic. I warned him especially about beginning phone conversations that way. He got the point and after a couple of false starts completely stopped.
MBAAKE:
Now please hold on, my comrade
said sardonically,
for you are just catering for confusion. For you first cry down capitalism as making slaves and next time you say we must turn from scientific socialism lest we pay five great surcharges. So then we must just set to idling and look at our hands whilst all about us white guys are undertaking everything. It is just that Karl Marx was only very late to find out about all what we have been stopped from doing since many years by whitemen. And once we begin again with socialism you forgot to say how whitemen always kill us, as with Asegyefo Nkrumah.
So now you must tell us what is this
suigenerism
where we must turn and what is
said very bitingly
vernacular development.
DENOON:
But again I repeat I have not used the phrase you just used, for twelve years.
And I just want to say I am straying from my brief, which is just to talk about villages, can we somehow right away devise a few things we can do to save the village.
And what I have been doing up to this point is to say, One, capitalism is killing the village everywhere, bleeding it, killing it, throttling it, stealing its young men. So I hope I established that, because I think I saw my comrades very much agreeing at that point.
So then, Two, is socialism the way you save the village?
Which I was prepared to hear said and to which I wanted to say no in advance to save time.
So tonight I am not talking about general systems except as answering objections in advance. So, One, the first question is, What is destroying the village? Answer: capitalism. Two, What can save the village? Answer: wait for socialism. The first answer is true and the second is false. Now about villages—
A VOICE:
So then we are just deceived if we see revolution upraising before our eyes.
DENOON:
Ah, revolution.
Nothing is more interesting than revolution, or should I say insurrection, because all the imagery of revolution comes from insurrection, which is a different thing.
I’m getting so far outside my brief it makes me nervous.
I should just say that even if you think socialism is the way, a way, to save the village, then revolution is the worst way to bring in socialism—positively, hands down, the worst.
This is what I meant when I said, also long ago, Socialism is the continuation of the romantic movement by any means necessary. This was a parody both on Clausewitz and on some people, socialists, who no longer exist, called the Black Panther Party. Revolution equals insurrection and insurrection is the icon at the heart of socialism.
You can see why! Socialists, especially young socialists, love the idea of revolution. Every circle of sociology majors and bookstore clerks wants to call itself the Revolutionary Party of the Left or the Party of the Revolutionary Left or the Left Revolutionary Party of the People—anything so long as revolution is in the title. We can understand this. Everything we want in a society is what we find brought out in people in the moment of insurrection. Spontaneity! Spontaneous hierarchy! Self-sacrifice! Staying awake all night! Working until we drop! Audacity! Camaraderie! The carnival behind the barricades—what it feels like when the police have just been kicked out of your quartier! Free eggs, free goods … until the stores that have been sacked lie empty. One man one gun! And don’t forget what it feels like to throw open the gates of the prisons! What a great moment! This is the moment the true socialist worships and thinks will be incarnated in the society on the morning after.
This is intellectual loneliness showing, I thought. It was evident he had a kind of hysteria to talk that was getting worse the more he was interrupted. He was veering all over. Who was Clausewitz to Mbaake? Denoon was supposed to be aiming himself at youth and he was talking about Clausewitz! The man was too lonely. I had no idea who he had with him out in the bush, but this scene suggested that they left something to be desired as discussants. The same sort of hysteria was familiar to me. I had experienced the same thing coming in from the Tswapong Hills to Keteng. I could be useful to this man. I love to talk, needless to say. Also I was pleased at how much of his rap I was getting, even if it was slightly outside my academic bailiwick. I love to talk. For a woman, I’m even considered a raconteuse. I remember jokes, for example. But then I also remember everything.
Also he was doing something else I considered compulsive, saying things that might constitute laugh lines in other settings, but not here. Who cared if he was willing to say of himself that he was wellknown to be gung ho for half measures and that if he had been in the October Revolution he would have been saying
some
power to the soviets?
And it was also compulsive and part of the same thing to recommend books in passing like
Soil and Civilization
and
Evolutionary Socialism
that no one in Botswana could get if they had a million dollars. They were hard to find in London and New York. He fought me on this. He had only
mentioned
Soil and Civilization
because it contained the key phrase Man is a parasite on soils, which had been a strobelike experience for him the first time he read it. I agree that man is a parasite, but I made the point that mentioning books when he was proselytizing that people could never hope to get their hands on just drives mankind crazy. This is the third world, I told him. Mention books you have copies of or offprints of the main passages of.
DENOON:
Making the point that the feelings that abound at the onset of insurrection fade away.
The moment is artificial and based on adrenaline and so forth. The prisons refill.
Look, if you look nowhere else, at Algeria. Of course there is much more to say on this, and I see my colleague from Local Government and Lands not smiling.
So as much as I appreciate the opportunity you have all given me to spontificate
he was doing it again,
I should return, I mean rather I must return, to my topic—which is how we can, all of us, of all persuasions—join to redeem and preserve Botswana’s villages. We must get back to the village.
BOSO VOICES:
Yes, back to the village! Back to the village! Yes, go back to the village!
Go back to the village! won out as the predominant cry. Denoon was patient until that stopped.