Chinedu Chukwudinma - A Rebel's Guide to Walter Rodney

Today Walter Rodney is perhaps best known for his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. But as Chinedu Chukwudinma shows in the latest of the Rebel's Guide series, Rodney's importance is much greater than that single work. Rodney was assassinated for his revolutionary activity at the tragically youthful age of 38. Yet in those years he developed into an important historian, Marxist revolutionary, journalist and activist. His ideas remain crucially relevant today and it is excellent to learn that his work is receiving a revival in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter.

Chukwudinma argues that it is Rodney's revolutionary activity that must be rescued. He points out that he is well known for How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and his historical work, but "fewer still remember the revolutionary struggle he led before his death in Guyana". Rodney's own political trajectory is fascinating. He was born during the Second World War in Guyana, his parents an activist part of the nationalist People's Progressive Party "attracted to the PPP's anti-colonial rhetoric". A brilliant student Rodney arrived in London in 1963 where he was immediately confronted with racism at SOAS. He found the British left dogmatic and sectarian, but personally developed in a study group led by the Marxist CLR James. Returning to Africa, and then going back to work in the West Indies, Rodney quickly became associated with radical groups and activism. His expulsion from Jamaica by the government was the spark for "Rodney Riots" in the summer of 1968, when hundreds chanted "Black Power". The important of these riots, "went beyond demands for [Rodney's] reinstatement. It lay in the poverty and political exclusion of Jamaicans and the rise of black consciousness among the young". Chukwudinma charts how Rodney's engagement with local radicals and anti-colonial activists saw him develop his ideas further. He writes:

In Jamaica, Rodney criticised the ruling class for flaunting the myth of a harmonious multiracial Jamaican society. He despised its national motto - "Out of Many, One People"-for obscuring the fact that a small multiracial elite ruled over an African majority. For Rodney, the elite feared above all the prospect of Jamaicans organising politically around their African identity. Therefore, many of his speeches [at the time] emphasised the need for blacks to reconnect with their African heritage". 

Within all of this Rodney was grappling with the question of the agency for revolutionary change. He admired Che Guevara's writing on guerrilla struggles, but was sceptical about its potential for Jamaica. He "celebrated" workers' strikes but saw the working class as "only one of the revolutionary classes". It was a wider engagement with African nationalist and anti-colonial movements that developed Rodney's thinking on this crucial political question. Back in Tanzania Rodney believed that "peasant Ujamaa villages" formed an alternative. These cooperative farms were created and supported by the state and were an attempt to break out of the limits imposed by the production of cash crops for western markets. Rodney argued these sort of cooperatives could form "the basis of a socialist society that avoided capitalism", if they were modernised and helped from without. Essentially he was arguing that Tanzania could make a socialist transformation without workers' revolution.

But the experience of the Tanzanian state and its failure to drive forward to socialism. Instead the state essentially forced the cooperatives to do their bidding, driving up production in the interests of the capitalist economy. Rodney saw in this echoes of the Stalinist regimes. Instead Rodney began to see the growing working class as an alternative, recognising in in rank and file strikes the real power of workers and their ability to stop the profits of capitalism. As Chukwudinma says, Rodney understood that the Tanzanian working class "was small but its strategic position in the economy gave it great power". 

Returning to Guyana in the mid 1970s Rodney flourished as a radical thinker and revolutionary. He began a "transformation into a full-time organiser of the working people." Chukwudinma tells the crucial story of the Guyana rebellion of 1979 and the role of Walter Rodney. It is worth emphasising the importance of this period, which will be almost unknown to most western activists. Yet Chukwudinma draws out lessons of general importance to socialists everywhere, as well as exploring the specific political questions for post-colonial Africa. Rodney helped made the Working Peoples' Alliance, into a mass organisation committed to workers' self-emancipation. Rodney wrote, "The revolution is made by ordinary people, not by angels, it's made by people from all walks of life, and more particularly by the working class who are in the majority."

The state murder of Walter Rodney arose out of the threat he posed to the capitalist class. In the aftermath the WPA gradually broke with revolutionary socialism in favour of electoralism. There's no doubt that this process was made easier by the loss of Rodney.

While I've focused here on Rodney's development as a revolutionary thinker, it must be made clear that Chukwudinma's book is a brilliant exposition of Rodney's theoretical thinking. There's an excellent chapter on his most famous work on the underdevelopment of Africa, as well as a detailed exploration of Rodney's thoughts on the close links between capitalism, colonialism and the construction of racism. Rodney's theoretical development on this arose from his detailed study of African history. As Chukwudinma explains:

Racism between Guyanese African and Indian workers was not a matter of natural prejudice or cultural difference. In fact, this divide originated in the colonial planation society which brought Africans as slaves and then Indians as indentured workers. As a Marxist, Rodney regarded racism in Guyana as the consequence of the white planter class's divide and rule strategy to control labour after the abolition of slavery in 1838. He gained that insight from his analysis of Guyanese history, whereby he recognised the material conditions for the existence of racism under capitalism.

Having begun this book knowing little of Walter Rodney's life and work, I finished it wanting to know a great deal more about this important revolutionary thinker and activist. Chinedu Chukwudinma's book is an excellent addition to the brilliant Rebel's Guide series and I heartedly recommend it to activists who are fighting the legacy of colonialism, racism and capitalism today.

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