Walter Rodney: a revolutionary for our times

Robert Cuffy: So we’re here to talk about Walter Rodney. I always find it remarkable to talk about Rodney because he’s someone who did not live a very long time. He was assassinated in 1980 at the tender age of 38, but obviously his life has had such an impact that we are here to discuss his legacy.

Why are we talking about Walter Rodney today? Well, in part, it has to do with the fact that Rodney’s ideas have received a new audience. There’s been a recent republishing of some of his works, like Groundings with My Brothers and his seminal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, as well as the manuscript he wrote on the Russian Revolution, published as a book by Verso Books.

From a Guyanese perspective, one of the things that has brought Rodney back into prominence is the fact that, in 2016, they held a commission of inquiry into his assassination. That inquiry ended up with a finding that the government at the time, the 1980 Guyana’s People’s National Congress, was in fact responsible.

The government that launched the inquiry, the People’s Progressive Party, could have done it at any time from when they came to power in 1992 up until 2016. But what happened was that Rodney’s legacy doesn’t fit perfectly into anyone’s playbook. And his life and his assassination have been uncomfortable facts for Guyana’s ruling political party as well as the opposition.

As I said before, the People’s National Congress was found in the commission of inquiry to have assassinated Rodney. But then the main opposition party at the time, the People’s Progressive Party—and both of those parties considered themselves socialists—would have to explain why, as the largest opposition party based on the working class, with a base in the sugar workers, they themselves were not allied with Rodney at the time.

I also would like to speak about Rodney from a particularly Guyanese perspective, because, as a tiny country with less than a million people and the only English speaking country in South America, the history of our country and things happening presently kind of bewilder people. But you can’t understand Rodney without understanding Guyana.

Rodney was born in Guyana in a period of  a lot of ferment. It was the anti-colonial period. And he was born and raised in a very particular time, before what we would describe as the big racial split in politics in Guyana. Both Afro-Guyanese, who are descended from enslaved Africans, and Indo-Guyanese, descended from Indian indentured laborers, formed the People’s Progressive Party as part of the anti-colonial struggle against the British. 

Eventually, there was a split along racial lines, but as Rodney was growing up, one of the things he did in a household filled with activists was selling the newspaper of the People’s Progressive Party. Rodney is also very much a creature of the Caribbean, he is part of the education system there where like other Caribbean revolutionaries like CLR James, he distinguished himself academically. In the Caribbean…when you’re leaving the elementary school system for the secondary school system you have to take an entrance exam and both CLR James and Walter Rodney are people of such brilliance that they scored into the top school. 

In many ways, social mobility in the Caribbean is tied to leaving the Caribbean, so both James and Rodney emigrated to continue their studies. Rodney went to England, where he attended the School of Oriental and African Studies. And that’s where he did a lot of his research, but he also engaged in what was politics at the time. He’d be in Hyde Park giving speeches on issues of the day, and he did this painstaking research that would lead to him writing these books.

If you examine Walter Rodney’s intellectual legacy, you’ll see an unceasing and ruthless criticism of all things existing, which is the Marxist method. Rodney didn’t just do this academically; he lived his life as such. And if you’ve ever read his Groundings with My Brothers, it is literally about sitting on the ground and talking to people.

So when Rodney was a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, at the Kingston campus, in addition to building with and teaching his students there, he would leave the campus and go into working-class and Rastafarian communities and literally sit on the ground and speak with them to see what was going on in their lives, to understand their struggles, and, in turn, teach them what he knew about Black history.

And I think it’s a challenge for everyone in the movement today, especially since those of us who enter the movement tend to come from more comfortable backgrounds. A lot of us work in academia. How do we build connections with the working class? I think the answers are found in Rodney himself.

But, like Rodney would tell you, no answers really come easily. You have to do a lot of painstaking research to get to them. A good example would be one of Rodney’s lesser known works, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905. One of the things he calculated in there was the tons of earth moved by enslaved Africans to create the irrigation system that exists in modern day coastal Guyana.

He would give presentations like this pretty often and people in the audience would ask questions: So well, Mr. Rodney, how do we know we should choose socialism? He once gave a speech on race and class and Guyanese politics at Columbia University, and a young man got up in the audience and asked something like that: Is it socialism? Is it capitalism? And I’ve always found Rodney’s response to be very indicative because he told the young man, I can tell you almost as an act of faith that socialism is the way forward. But what you really need to do is look at your own life, look at society, and ask yourself, where am I going? And more importantly, what’s stopping me from achieving the things I want to achieve? And assess from there what ideological framework you want to get into to build what you want to build.

Some of you who know me know that I volunteered at the Marxist Internet Archive, so I’ve done the transcription for some of the works on there by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunyaskaya and other people. One of the things I transcribed is a document by James called “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power.” It’s a memorial speech C.L.R. James gives after Rodney’s assassination in 1980. James points out that what Rodney had is something James didn’t have: Rodney had a generation of people like James himself, Aimé Césaire, and Claudia Jones to look to as mentors. James says that when he entered the field, in the early 20th century, he had to blaze a trail.

For people like me, I have the honor of seeing both James and Rodney as political mentors. But as a Guyanese, I’m actually, in some ways, cut off from that legacy. The reality is that Rodney was not mentioned in the Guyanese curriculum, despite the fact that he specifically wrote children’s books to try to address things like, What does it mean to be Black? What does it mean to be African? What does it mean to be Indian? And this is why I mentioned that both the political parties in Guyana are responsible for this, because at any time when the People’s Progressive Party came to power in 1992, they could have integrated Walter Rodney into the curriculum, but they didn’t.

Around 2017, I was in Guyana, and I was like, okay, I’m here. I’m gonna go to the National Archives and find out everything I can about Rodney. After all, the National Archives are called the Walter Rodney Archives. And I was quickly informed that there were only three or four books about Rodney in the archives. They had Groundings and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. I thought they would have the whole catalog of like Rodney’s Working People’s Alliance newspaper that I could sift through, and it’s a very deliberate effort to push away the legacy of somebody who’s uncomfortable.

One of the things we often talk about on the socialist Left is, is it race or is it class that is the primary question? And in that same aforementioned speech on race and class in Guyanese politics, Rodney says, well, for me, class is fundamental, but what is more important is not race or class, but rather how race and class interact in specific historical moments and what lessons you can draw from that. And this is, to me, the essence of Rodneyism, if there is such a thing: That he challenges you not to act from abstractions, but to investigate things specifically, whether it’s the tons of earth moved by Africans in early Guyana or  what the specific interactions of race and class are in a particular area. 

Rodney did a series of lectures when he was in Hamburg, Germany, and he talked about how comfortable historians are investigating the past. Because the past is dead. As he put it, they’re very comfortable with mummies. But if you try to interpret the present, if you try to challenge living history, that’s where you’re running into trouble. And Rodney’s life is a life, in many ways, of running into trouble. When he studied in England and sat at the feet of C. L. R. James and other people, he ran into trouble for not knowing the right answers.When he was part of building Ujamaa socialism in Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, he had the nerve to write an op-ed criticizing the progress of the revolution, to which Nyerere wrote a scathing rebuttal. When Rodney was in Jamaica, he was such a firebrand that he was investigated by the Jamaican government at the time. They kept a file on him and he was critical of even the left wing of the government there. In writing about race and class and Guyanese politics, he was trying to give a criticism of how it is that some elite politicians will use the process of racial identification to win, the working class set aside. One person he decided to critique was Jomo Kenyatta, the anti-colonial leader of Kenya. You know, like, you have to be pretty much into this ruthless criticism thing to be bringing this up. And Rodney’s ultimate demise in Guyana came from his militant fight against the Burnham government at the time.

The Burnham government at the time was actually considered part of the socialist and Pan-African movement. So, when Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980, they invited Burnham to be one of the honorees, and they also invited Walter Rodney. But at the time Burnham’s government in Guyana was actually pretty strict against Rodney. They revoked his traveling privileges. Rodney traveled what we call backtrack. He went through the Corentyneand then he moved on to Suriname and then French Guyana. He flew to Europe and then eventually made his way to Zimbabwe. So you could imagine Burnham’s shock at the conference to see this man he’s banned from traveling there.

During the independence celebrations, they recognized Rodney in the audience and said we have a preeminent Pan-Africanist and socialist in the audience who must come and give a speech. So Rodney comes and he gives a speech, and there’s the president of his country sitting there just stewing in his juices.

This is quintessential Walter Rodney for me: He tells people, and I’m going to paraphrase here, that in the struggle for a better world, the agent of that struggle is the working class, and he makes clear that the struggle for Black liberation is key to that, because it is the Black working class that has built the basis of modern day capitalism.He says that only the working class can liberate the working class, and that anyone who tells you the opposite is trying to fool you or fool themselves. 

He says that freedom is not a gift. Freedom is something for which we fight, and then we win. I’ll actually end on that note, because the self-emancipation of the working class is the goal, and, as we look at the class struggle, it’s also important not just to look at the struggle between classes, but also the struggle within classes. Rodney is well known for going to Pan-African congresses and saying, you know, like, this is not just a happy get together. What about those of you who claim to be Pan African and are also ruthlessly exploiting your own people?

So, as we are all part of the working class here, it is important to say, like, yes, I’m part of the working class. But what does it mean to be a member of the working class who’s unionized versus a member of the working class who’s not unionized? What does it mean to be a member of the working class who’s undocumented versus someone who has their paperwork? And how does that influence how the working class lives, produces, and reproduces itself? Oftentimes in the United States, what it means is the kind of job you can get as an undocumented or Black person is very different from the kind of job you can get as someone with papers or as someone who’s white.

So a critical examination, not just of the world, but also of ourselves, is the legacy of Walter Rodney. Leo is gonna talk more, but that’ll be it for me. 

Lee Wengraf: Thank you, Robert. That was brilliant. Now I’m gonna turn it over to our next speaker, Leo Zeilig, a London-based writer, activist, and socialist. He’s written several books, mainly on the history of the modern African working class, particularly social movements. He is also the author of three novels and of a new book from Haymarket, A Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story, and one of the main editors at the Review of African Political Economy. So let’s give a warm welcome to Leo.

Leo Zeilig: Thanks very much. It always puts a lot of pressure on people when you get a readout like that. So, just warning you, don’t get your expectations too high. Comrades, it’s an enormous privilege to be able to speak on Walter Rodney and to be invited to the Socialism Conference to do that. I can think of no more appropriate gathering to discuss Rodney’s legacy.

I would like to add that it was Lee Wengraf’s excellent book Extracting Profit, which includes a quite brilliant analysis of Rodney’s work, which helped to shape my own work, thinking and biographical study of his life and work. Lee’s work is of exceptional value, and I urge everyone to read her work.

What I want to do is pick up on some of the things that Robert has said, but to look specifically as a case study, of Rodney’s trip to Hamburg in 1978, pivotal for a whole number of reasons, which I’ll go into. But I want to start with something else.

A comrade of Walter’s in the WPA, Eusi Kwayana, in an extraordinary essay, “Walter Rodney, Prophet of Self Emancipation,” related a talk that Rodney gave soon after he returned to Guyana in 1974. He writes, 

 To illustrate the role of propaganda . . . [Rodney] told a tale . . . of lions who went to view an art exhibition and were amazed at the claims on the canvas made by hunters and their glorifiers. A lion shook his head with resignation and was heard muttering, “If only lions could paint!”

For me, there is no story that better illustrates Walter Rodney’s life mission—helping lions to paint. 

To lay my cards on the table, I think that Walter Rodney is perhaps one of the greatest activists, thinkers, and revolutionaries of his generation. And as we’ve heard, his life was cruelly cut short on the 13th of June, 1980. What is notable is that, throughout his life, he maintained, as we’ve heard from Robert, this extraordinary rigor of thought and analysis. Never a shortcut. Everything in front of him. Every source read. A capacity to learn from his comrades and peers—which, I have to say, is rare among the socialist politics and movements that I’ve been in—and also, interestingly, in Tanzania in particular, to learn from his students. This is brilliantly summarized by Jesse Benjamin, the Walter Rodney scholar in Atlanta, who writes about 

How real and urgent [Rodney’s] search for truth and answers was, but also how undoctrinaire and creative he was in his thinking, . . . studying thoroughly the deep historical roots of each place, and then the process of decolonizing our thinking sufficiently to the task of liberation.

He goes on to mention Rodney’s interest in physics and his extraordinary interest in the natural world and the environment. I would also say that he was, as we’ve heard, a Marxist of astonishing depth and originality and rigor. And there are many stories that illustrate this.

One is that he received a delegation of students when he was at the University of Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s complaining about the rigors of his own teaching and marking and how he insisted on research and sometimes fatiguing processes of referencing work. But for Rodney, there was no shortcut—we must maintain those rigors of inquiry and of work in order to take on those who are trying to tell a very different story about human development. 

Rodney travels to Tanzania, graduates in record time with a PhD from SOAS in 1966, and takes up a lectureship at the University of Daesalam, a few months after graduation. And just a very brief word about Tanzania at the time: President Julius Nyerere was moving towards a project of state socialism or socialism from above. And it attracted a lot of attention. In some senses, it was, if not the Mecca of revolution, the Mecca of socialism on the continent of that period. Liberation organizations from other struggles around the continent based themselves in Dar es Salaam largely as a result of this opening up to struggle and liberation that Nyerere allowed.

It also attracted a large number of expat fellow travelers of the Ujamaa or familyhood socialism transformation that was underway in the country, which was hugely problematic and criticized by Tanzanian comrades and by Rodney later as well. But we’ll talk about that. 

Rodney stays in Tanzania until 1974 and throws himself into the discussions and debates triggered by the Arusha Declaration, which outlined the nationalization and collectivization of Tanzania. It was an effort to drag Tanzania back from the underdevelopment of colonial penetration and occupation, largely by way of state-led projects. The university where Rodney is becomes this extraordinary incubator  of debates and discussions about the nature of socialism, very detailed conversations about Marxism and socialist politics.

Rodney, at this point, is a keen, but not uncritical, supporter of Nyerere and these projects. He was extremely critical of the other more conservative “briefcase revolutions,” as he describes them, across the continent at the time. His work was exhaustive, constant, involved writing, teaching, and working with some of the university’s most militant students in a number of different organizations.

And there are stories of Rodney working on manuscripts papers and lectures with his children across his lap. With a capacity to turn from socializing to work and to his focused projects. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Rodney also brings the debates and discussions of what Jesse Benjamin describes as“a Marxism in which Black Power is central.”

And these are debates which I would argue were absolutely key to Rodney’s Marxism and also to expat life at the University of Dar es Salaam. With all sorts of tensions, including some racial tensions that spill over at different points, which Rodney takes on. He publishes one of the most astonishing books during this period in 1972 as, as Robert has mentioned, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

The book is clearly addressing a Black audience. It explains the poverty of African societies, how they were dragged back from positions of development, and the continent’s position in a global capitalist hierarchy that has systematically bled its wealth, resources, and humanity. Now, what’s interesting about the book is it becomes a movement.

It’s sold at activist stalls in New York, San Francisco, but also in newly independent Africa, in Accra, in Lagos. Rodney even receives fan mail requesting his support. One writer from Lagos in 1973 says, 

I’ve just bought your book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and I want to inform you that you are one of my heroes. I am just 20 and entering the University of Baden next September, so all I need now are inspirations from you. 

Rodney at this point throws himself into coordinating translations of the book, mailing mass orders of the manuscript, and he feeds it into this radicalizing Black Power politics in the U.S., in which Rodney is also a vital intellectual force.

He leaves Tanzania with his family in 1974, telling his comrade at the time who pleads with him to stay, “No comrade. I can make my contribution here, but I will never be able to grasp the idiom of the people. I will not be able to connect easily. I have to go back to the people I know and who know me.”

So he returns to Guyana and to the capital, Georgetown, having secured a lectureship in History at the National University. However, Burnham intervenes and forces the university to rescind the appointment. And there’s lots of things to say here, not least the dangers of teaching African history and radical teaching today, the attack on which is a current campaign in the UK with people getting sacked. (Some of you may have heard of the radical scholar Hakim Adi and his African history courses.) But Burnham is also keen to eliminate a critic.

Determined to stay, but without formal employment, Rodley quickly immerses himself in militant organization, the Working People’s Alliance. The period until he’s murdered can be characterized as one of extraordinarily intense activism, travel, research, and political involvement in the WPA. He’s also taking teaching gigs around the world in order to pay for his family’s upkeep and to contribute to the WPA party funds. 

Rodney’s cautious and critical support for top-down projects of socialist transformation in Africa were very much a thing of the past in this period. He had always been critical and his support was never straightforward. However, with his resolute organizing of the working people in Guyana, there were extraordinary and valuable signs of these shifts.

Not least what happens in Germany in 1978, at one of these teaching gigs, a course where he’s there for three months. The lectures that he gives during this course give an impression of an activist and thinker in astonishing form, challenging wide-ranging issues—the continent’s history, slavery, independence, projects of radical socialist development— and frequently interrupted by students. You have all of this in the transcripts in the archives in Atlanta. Rodney is often forced to justify a statement, deal with a complex issue of political economy and Marxist theory, and he’s able to do it with astonishing sophistication and clarity, never losing patience or his narrative thread. It’s a wonder to behold.

The lectures are also deeply reflective, referring to his experiences in Tanzania and the conclusions he was drawing on the weaknesses of state socialism. He writes about the role of the state in Tanzania, which he had seen as a possible vehicle for socialist transformation, but now his attitude has become much more critical. After independence, he says, the so called official organizations of workers are a farce, a process of co-optation by the state. Independent unions were vacuumed up into a state-controlled organization. But what attracts his particular attention and what is particularly interesting about this lecture series in Hamburg in 1978, is his focus on the strikes and factory occupations in 1973 in Tanzania, where he sees a new politics in formation, a “workerist” turn as he describes it.

He describes this period as an illustration of the fact that “workers are capable of running this enterprise more efficiently than the economic bureaucracy.” In direct challenge to the management of companies, workers were “making arguments that went beyond their own immediate material interests. They were carrying the class . . . to even higher levels by, in fact, posing the question, who should control production?”

In these struggles from below, Rodney says, he saw a direct challenge to the state that had declared itself socialist and the possibility of a new society based on that class challenge. This is really important. And I quote Rodney once more, speaking the following day, as it turns out, on this same strike wave:

Even though theoretically the Tanzanian revolution accepted a greater role for workers, when they made an important policy statement in 1973 [Mwongozo] the workers themselves tried to implement the rights that were supposedly safeguarded by this charter.

And as often happens, as we know, statements that are made from on high, are seized on as initiatives from below.Workers themselves attempt to implement these demands. Rodney records one case: “In one very important instance, workers actually took over a factory.” He’s talking about the 1973 strike wave. “And they didn’t take it over from the government, they took it over from a private owner.” You can see Rodney’s excitement in these words:

And they said, we can run this factory, which was a rubber factory, the Mount Carmel Rubber Factory . . They locked out the management and they were running the factory. And this caused the greatest excitement and fear on behalf of the bureaucracy. 

And so Rodney, in these lectures, draws the obvious conclusions. The economic bureaucracy was also drawing its own conclusions in Tanzania during that period. And the conclusions were these: 

If workers were running one factory, then maybe they will run another and another. And this doesn’t look too good for the economic wing of the bureaucracy . . . their whole rationale of production as a class will disappear if there was workers control . . . so they moved to crush these initiatives.

All sorts of fascinating things are going on here, not least that this was a conception of socialist and revolutionary transformation from below against a government that was declaring itself socialist and revolutionary.

No matter the differences in the complexion of the government’s rhetoric, the threat of these strikes and the possibilities of real transformation they contained were the same. The strikes had to be stamped out. Sure enough they were. Rodney goes on to explain, however, that “What in English we call wildcat strikes are not strikes which the union initiates, but strikes which come from below.” The workers themselves decide on direct action. So it’s these unorganized strikes, not those pre-arranged by trade union leaders, that become the center of Rodney’s focus in the Hamburg lectures, and also the center of his organizing in Guyana. 

And yet it is not simply a strike but rather what the strike portends. Out of the action, away from the immediate material interests themselves, there were seeds to another power, seeds to another society. And this, of course, is key to Rodney’s activism and work through his life, in the Groundings, in his whole approach to politics. Workers themselves being the force of self-liberation and self-organization was at the center of his thinking and his organizing.

In addition, and as a consequence, Rodney argued that some sort of rehash of national liberation, which at that point was being advocated by the government in Tanzania and by the ruling party (TANU) was not enough. Nyerere, whom Rodney had celebrated, supported, and, to some extent, worked with while he was in Tanzania, and who didn’t leave the presidency until 1985, was attempting to revive the politics of liberation, to “reassert” national liberation, as Rodney says.

This is what Rodney says about this effort:  

My feeling is that in spite of all the rhetoric, TANU has not been transformed, that it remains a nationalist party under control of the petit bourgeoisie as it always has, incapable of providing the basis for sustained socialist transformation. 

In other words, socialist change requires pressure from outside the ruling party and in opposition to it, and in which revolutionary organization is central, much as Rodney’s WPA was working against the Burnham regime in Guyana. 

What Rodney is saying in these lectures and, more broadly, in this extraordinary last period of his life, is that in regimes which were profoundly different, in Guyana and Tanzania, but where the essential class component was not, if the working class struggle from below in occupations and wildcat strikes was necessary in Guyana, it was also indispensable for the construction of socialism in Tanzania and, of course, across the continent. To those who declared that there was something unique about Tanzania, Rodney was equally dismissive. It is important to recognize, he said, that if it’s a general pattern, which we had been discussing so far, by which the colonization process ended through an alliance of classes. But within the alliance, workers and peasants have never dominated. 

What we see in Hamburg is a political orientation to self-activity, occupations, wild-cat strikes, and the working class, not as one player in a coalition, in numerous alliances, but as a central organizing force. A new state, he argued, would not come about by an enlightened leader, but through the frenzy of a class in the process of knowing itself, and through what it alone was capable of creating. In this scenario, the existing national bourgeoisie, in Rodney’s words, and their whole rationale of production would disappear.

The period in Guyana in the late 1970s, largely unknown by many, is one of astonishing revolutionary energy and politics. Political developments in the WPA, the upturn in 1979, and the civil rebellion as it was called, in the national strikes and the protests and the unity between Indian and African workers, offered a glimpse of another world.

Tragically, the full development of this politics and its realization under the coordination and leadership of Rodney and his comrades—there was an extraordinary generation of revolutionaries at that time in the WPA—was largely broken by his murder on the 13th of June, 1980. 

Robert has spoken about C. L. R. James. I would say the lecture that he delivers after Rodney dies is partly a lament to a lost son he had taught. But it is also something else. It contains, I think, within it, the sense of historical loss at Rodney’s murder. So it’s C.L.R. James understanding what that loss means for the Caribbean and for people of the Global South and around the world.

And Burnham decided that Rodney, as we know, had to be eliminated; the unity that he’d helped to forge between Indian and Afro-Guyanese working people had to be broken. Rodney’s emphasis on the self-activity and self-emancipation of the working class, “helping the lions to paint,” recorded in his Hamburg lectures was an important moment in an extraordinary life, brutally taken from his family, the people of Guyana, and the world. But there remains a huge amount for us still to learn from his work, activism, and life.

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Featured Image Credit:Nicholas Laughlin modified by Tempest.