MBAAKE:
Ehé, so now we must just perish whilst makhoa dispute about which way we must live.
DENOON:
Just what I’m saying — you are perishing now, not you personally but many of your countrymen, and waiting for socialism is not the way to stop perishing.
Again he was detouring. It was a reprise about capitalism, having to do with the fact that the white West or the market system, whichever, was taking down the forests of West Africa at the rate of five percent a year,and this was nursing the drought that was throttling everyone in the south. I could imagine Denoon starting an appearance by saying Hello, first may I digress? which I told him.
DENOON:
There is no socialism without water. He let this sink in, the intent being to show that somehow capitalism in its application to west and southern Africa was like a pincers, leading to desiccation. It was not carefully crafted. I could have done better. It was a confused amalgam of market-driven deforestation on the one hand and borehole pump peddling in the south on the other. So the white West says Ah, drought, then here — buy some borehole pumps and we will even loan or give you the rigs to drill with, and take your cattle deeper and deeper into the Kalahari and go destroy the grasses there, and in the meantime put in a wellfield in Lobatse and pump out the last fossil water in that part of the country so that construction can resume and more people can be accommodated on land that is turning into a husk. Ah, and in the meantime keep buying more and more diesel from us to run your pumps, thank you very much.
Nobody is saying to wait and watch. The reverse is what I’m saying. You, we, must look immediately around and see how we can stop being destroyed as of now.
By the way, Karl Marx was a lakhoa, if I recall. And unfortunately in his scheme, which many of you prefer to cling to, the natural world is only a factor of production and is inexhaustible. Now—
A VOICE:
So you must hurry and catechize us as to vernacular development, isn’t it? So that we may be saved in time.
DENOON:
Oh god grimly. I haven’t used the phrase vernacular development since 1968. And I am not here to catechize anybody on that or on any scheme to save the third world or the world overall. Not tonight. Tonight there will be no exercise in hubristics.
But I just want to say I could feel another involution coming. I felt like joining Boso on the spot. This man needed editing. I wanted to scream at him to give us the five sins of socialism or sit down.
But I just want to say that if you are bystanding waiting for the dispute between capitalist makhoa and socialist makhoa to come to a victory for one side he was now talking practically pure para-African-English and not realizing it, then please stop waiting for that. Because capitalism has already won. The world capitalist republic is here. Mother Russia is in debt to the great banks, more so every day, not to mention Mother Poland. The market is coming! the market is coming! one might say. Socialism is decomposing.
Ah, but the argument goes on, of course: in the universities.
All I am saying is that the conversion of Russia is happening behind the backs of the generals and commissars. It has happened.
Moans and hums of disapproval from the left.
DENOON:
But just let me try again to go in order as to socialism.
Let us say you want to clear away private ownership of productive property and put everything under the state. Well and good, but then you must be prepared to pay five surcharges, very heavy surcharges. These are permanent recurrent costs that never go away. They are intrinsic to your system.
Also, these are costs not given very much prominence in the literature, or should I say reiterature.
But to proceed.
Cost number one is that since you have lost the use of the market, which allocates everything gratis, you must set up a mechanism to allocate things by command. And you must pay people to do that, a lot of people. Historically it has taken somewhere between twenty-five and thirty percent of the total workforce just to do this. You have to remove this large bloc of workers, take them away from productive work, the making of things, just to do this one function, allocating by command, as well as it can be done, which is not very well for the most part. You have to find the people to do this — which is not so easy in Africa, which capitalism is very much but not wholly to blame for — train them, and pay them. And many of them will be among the most talented people in any generation. And they will have to devote their intelligence to this function. So, number one.
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.