Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why Dangiwa Umar Should be theStandard-bearer of the Third Force

Reformists will need a "talented tenth," and the revolutionary alternative will depend on a "revolutionary vanguard." Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, C.L.R. James - all the theorists of power and society were clear about it. The "single leader" was the Stalinist heresy that created the profound contradiction of the Russian revolution, and what Stalin did was to embark on a murderous terror campaign that destroyed the vanguard and moved for the kind of power that  concentrated authority on "the leader." CLR James in fact demonstrates the same contradiction in the Black Jacobins, in pointing out that the Haitian revolution was compromised with the rise of Toussaint as the single iconic, and symbolic leader, and subsequently, when the council of Generals chose Dessalines as "the leader." Leadership that regenerates the moral purpose of a society is driven by consillient force, not by "A  GOOD LEADER."
Obi Nwakanma



From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2018 11:20 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why Dangiwa Umar Should be theStandard-bearer of the Third Force
 
Even when I used to be a doctrinaire Marxist, I also struggled with the praxis and moral propriety of vanguardism. As you said, a select elite few can't possibly embody and give expression to the aspirations of the masses of the people. Nevertheless, the masses, who are often diffident and fatalistic, need to be prodded to shake up the system. And there lies the tension in Marxian epistemology: the notion of an inexorable, deterministic imperative that will propel the masses to take their destiny into their own hands and the reality that the masses need a vanguard to raise their consciousness and to help them extirpate an oppressive system. This tensile epistemological stress is at the core of Laclau and Mouffe's notion of the "double void" in Marxist thought.

But wherever one stands in this debate, it would be escapist to imagine that a leaderless, self-propelled change is possible.

Farooq 

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Social Science Building 
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will


On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 4:37 PM, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

Well, vanguardism is one approach—lenin over Trotsky, or over the socialists. Me, I favour socialists, or better still the anarchists of the 30s.

I always took it that the vanguardism of the communists was their worst mistake.

Mistake under stalin

mistake under mao

mistake corrected over and over by Gramsci, by Raymond Williams, by some other notion of consciousness besides that of the elite few who claim to know what the masses don't know

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 30 January 2018 at 13:38
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why Dangiwa Umar Should be theStandard-bearer of the Third Force

 

But even in revolutionary thinking, which requires the extirpation of the old order for the inauguration of a new one, you need a vanguard, and all vanguards are led by someone. Either way, you can't avoid coming to terms with the instrumentality of leadership in bringing about systemic changes.

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