This is a reply to the polemic titled “Against Supermarxist Tendencies” by African Yeast.
African Yeast said that he wrote his piece as a comrade, and as such, the Coordinating Committee of the Naija Marxists Movement, are to answer as comrades, as well. We share an enemy, i.e., the parasites in power who own Nigeria and the imperial system that keeps them seated, and that shared enemy is exactly why this reply is necessary, and why we write it plainly, despite the fact that African Yeast has indeed left the Naija Marxist Movement.
A shared enemy is not a shared road, and not all roads lead to Rome. Some lead to confusion, and a desert of wasted effort, especially for people who refuse to learn from history, no matter how recent that history is. That is the kind of road the polemic by African Yeast has laid down, and we will prove it to be so. You cannot give what you don’t have and African Yeast does not have the theoretical clarity, the historical knowledge, nor the organisational discipline to hand the objective reality, nor a workable suggestion on the steps ahead, and our response will show how so.
For us to fight our enemies, we need to know who they are, how they operate, and how to defeat them. This is far from a moralistic posturing. We have watched the ‘Left’ across this continent take “pragmatic” turns away from theory, again and again for decades, with every one of those turns leading to a dead end. Millions of Nigerians and Africans are searching right now for a way out of hunger, joblessness, insecurity, and the endless looting of the continent by the capitalist ruling class. These layers of persons rose during the EndSARS, the Gen Z revolutionary movement in Kenya, Madagascar, and will, in the rest of Africa.
But each time these forces rise, their energy is drained away with nothing changing at the level of their material conditions, which proves our case. The EndSARS moment was crushed at the Lekki tollgate, whilst the Kenyan Gen Z revolt extracted a tax concession and was then demobilised. Neither consolidated into anything that outlasted the moment, even though both knew exactly who they were fighting, which was their own ruling class, not some distant imperial abstraction. However, what neither had was an organisation capable of turning that clarity into lasting power, a party, a programme, a leadership disciplined enough to hold the line once the state started making promises, buying time, or picking off the loudest voices one by one.
Recent history in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri-Lanka shows that spontaneity can still topple a government once the balance of forces has turned against a regime. But toppling a government is not the only task. The main task is to change the material conditions of the people and resolve the contradictions of the capitalist system that produced their suffering in the first place. That path requires a revolutionary party with ideas, programs and disciplined enough to hold power once it is taken and use it to remake society. This requires understanding issues of the economy, issues of the class and capitalist system, as well as how the formations of a new society would come to be. Without one, a movement either watches the old ruling class return under a new name, or recoils and waits to strike again blindly. Building such a revolutionary party requires clarity: knowing who the enemy is, where the class lines run, and how capitalism works both globally and inside Africa specifically. This is why theory must lead practice; the lessons have already been distilled, at real cost, from past failure, so that theory can shape practice instead of relearning them in blood. Theory leads practice, and it is theory that leads our practice. If we get the theory wrong and we march the masses down a road that ends where past roads ended, we will, at the end of the day, have the same exploitative system still in existence.
So when a document, like that from African Yeast, confidently hands the growing ‘Left’ of Nigeria a wrong map, the need to answer such positions is not a squabble between scholars but a part of clearing the path for people who are looking for a way through. That is our verdict on this document. It is not a Marxist analysis of Africa. It uses Marxist language to reach a conclusion that would stand the working class and youth down and hand the leadership of the struggle, once again, to the ruling class and their mechanisations. This means that if the movement follows it, we will lose, and we will lose in the exact way Africa already lost once before, in the 1960s, 70s, 80s until today.
The document opens by making a false claim in saying because members of the Naija Marxists have argued that as Marxism is a science, i.e. revolutionary science, it means we are arguing that Marxism can never be applied wrongly, drawing in Einstein to make us sound like people who think we cannot be corrected. That is a distortion of the actual recorded conversation, and correcting it is essential, as it is the spine of the rest of our response.
What did the comrades actually say? First: Newton did not invent gravity. Gravity had been pulling objects to the ground for the whole history of the earth before Newton was born. What Newton did was study it patiently and write down the law that was already there. This means the law does not depend on Newton’s opinion of it. It works in the village and in the laboratory, whether or not anyone has ever measured it.
Second: Marx did the same kind of work, only on the political, sociological and economical organisation of human society. He did not invent the fact that a boss keeps the difference between what a worker produces and what the worker is paid. He did not invent the split between the people who own factories, banks, and land and the people who own nothing but their ability to work. Yes, he sat in the British Museum for years reading real factory records and real wage data, and he wrote down the laws he found operating in front of him. These laws are the foundation of Marxism. They are as real and as objective as gravity, and they operate everywhere capitalism operates, which includes every capitalist country in Africa.
To say these laws are real, and that they do not bend to our wishes, is not a boast that we personally can never be wrong. It is the first rule of materialism, which simply means that the world exists outside our heads and does not rearrange itself to match our ideas, no matter how noble or misguided. We have always admitted that a Marxist can misread a concrete situation and reach a false conclusion, and comrades have even said so directly. The history of the progressive ‘Left’ in Nigeria is a telltale sign of this!
What we will not accept however, is the distortion the polemic is trying to engage in, i.e., the idea that the law of class somehow weakens once you cross into Africa’s capitalist mode of production, so we should let race take equal measure as the real engine of history. If someone claims that gravity stops working inside their compound, they will not be doing ‘local science,’ but simply have walked out of science altogether, deep into the realms of idealism. The document from Yeast invariably does the same thing with society, in a shabby form, we might add, whilst pointing the finger at comrades for “dogmatism”.
Studying the concrete conditions of Nigeria and applying the laws of Marxism to them is simply Marxism, not dogmatism or any form of deviation. We are the Naija Marxists after all, not the Naija Pragmatics; we are to study and apply Marxism. As any genuine Marxist understands, the laws of capitalism produce different class formations when presented with different material conditions. The law is constant; the ground it acts on is not. A simple analogy would help illustrate what we mean: water always flows downhill toward whatever ground is lowest, and that law is the same anywhere on earth. But if you run the same water through the flat delta of the Niger and through the steep valleys of the Rhine, you will get two entirely different rivers, one broad and braided into many channels, the other narrow and fast. Nobody looks at those two rivers and concludes that gravity works differently in Nigeria than it does in Germany.
The law is constant, but the land it moves across is not.
In the Manchester and London that Marx studied, the law of value built a giant factory proletariat. In Lagos, that same law creates a giant formal, informal and unemployed mass hustling to survive. So, what is the constant and what is the variable in these instances? The constant is the law itself, the division between those who own the means of production and those who own nothing but their labour, and the compulsion that drives capital always toward maximum extraction, wherever it operates. The variable on the other hand is everything the law finds existing, i.e., the existing productive forces, the history of the land, the shape the local economy had already taken before capital arrived, etc. The law is identical in both; what differs is the class structure it produces, because the conditions it acts on differ. That difference is what every Nigerian Marxist has to study.
In Africa’s case, what capitalism found was a continent already structured by its own kingdoms, tribute systems, slave economy, and forms of unfree labour. The variation in the result is therefore not evidence of a second law, i.e. race, as African Yeast argues, but of the law of capitalism operating in a society where it did not grow from within but entered by force once it reached its monopoly stage. This is not unique to Africa; this is a law of capitalism. Capital at the monopoly stage hunts beyond its own borders for new markets, raw materials and cheap labour, and where the new market will not acquiesce peacefully it takes what it needs by conquest. Africa suffered the same process capitalism has always used to manufacture a working class everywhere, only later.
African Yeast misreads this, however. He takes the difference in the class formation and mistakes it for a difference in the law itself, and jumps to the conclusion that a different law rules in Africa. Once someone believes that, believes there is an ‘exceptionalism’ in their case, they go hunting for an ancillary cause, and the only available one is ‘race’, in its most idealistic form, turning a person who wants to sound as a materialist into a rambling idealist without even noticing the difference.
Yeast cites Marx’s 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, where Marx restricted his account of primitive accumulation to Western Europe and declined to prescribe it as a universal path. This is a clear misreading of Marx’s words. Marx was not warning that Marxist categories should stop at only Europe’s border, he was warning against assuming every society must repeat the specific sequence England went through, i.e., enclosure, forced proletarianisation, and all. As we have already shown, the law is constant, the ground it acts on is not, and that is precisely what Marx meant: investigate each society’s own concrete variable rather than assume it repeats England’s. One thing Yeast forgot to add with this, especially as he gave the Russian example, is that Lenin took that instruction seriously and applied it to Russia in his book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, where he found that capitalism was already developing through Russia’s own route, inside a society of peasants and communal land tenure that looked nothing like Manchester. One has to ask whether African Yeast has actually read any of the traditions he is lecturing us about.
At this juncture, we have to, in addressing Yeast’s error, explain rudimentarily what capitalism is. Capitalism is not simply factories, nor is any one country’s history. It is a set of social relations, i.e., the class that owns the land, the tools, the means by which anything gets produced, and another class that owns nothing but its own capacity to work, and must sell that capacity to the first class to survive. Wherever that relation exists, whatever it is wrapped in, be it in a plantation, peasant village, market stall, oil rig, etc, that is capitalism, and the law of value operates on it the same way everywhere, and the basic rule remains Labour creates value. That is the investigation Lenin did on Russia; who owns what.
Yeast looks at the African formation, the informal mass, the local ruling capitalist class’s (comprador bourgeois) wealth, and thinks “this does not look like the textbook European proletariat and bourgeoisie, so something else must be organising it, and that thing must be race.” In not understanding what capitalism actually is, he manufactures a distance between capitalism as he wrongly pictures it and what Africa looks like on the ground. Once you define capitalism correctly, by the relation as we have explained, that gap simply is not there to fill anymore. This means the unemployed youths in Abuja, the herder dispossessed of his land in the Sahel, the miner in Katanga, all stand in the identical relation to whoever owns the job market, the mine, the land they no longer hold. This is a fundamental law of Marxism.
Denied the racial gap, Yeast tries a second one. He makes the claim that there is no active proletariat in Africa today, writing that “the overwhelming majority of the African labouring population does not fit the orthodox proletarian schema” and that Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Kinshasa hold no one resembling “Marx’s classical proletariat.” This is another gross misreading of how the laws of capitalism actually work on the continent. The examples he gave through the analysis of Amilcar Cabral, i.e. Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s were small, largely agrarian territories under Portuguese rule. Yeast transposes that specific, dated condition onto the whole of Africa today, as though nothing has changed since. Worse, he treats “proletariat” as a narrow, frozen category, basically the 19th-century European factory worker, and then concludes that most African labourers fall outside it. That is not how Marx, Lenin, or any serious Marxist ever understood proletarianisation.
So, who are the proletariat? It is a shame we have to explain this to a fellow self-acclaimed Marxist, but explain it we must! The proletariat are the class of people that own nothing BUT their labour to survive. If the African driver, dispatch rider, warehouse loader, cleaner, security guard, call-centre agent, traffic warden, etc, live by selling labour-power, they are proletarian, even if their contracts are “informal” and their workplace is not a factory. Marx did not tie the proletariat to one costume of employment; he tied it to the social relation between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Under that definition, Africa’s proletariat includes workers with formal contracts and unions, and workers selling their labour piecemeal in precarious jobs and those seeking jobs.
As Marxists, we know that life is constantly in motion, and Africa today holds a definite proletariat in that sense: organised labour in the offices and docks, in the mines, in transport and in oil, and beside it a vast reserve army of informal and unemployed workers, all forced to sell their labour-power in some form and all available to organise on class lines the moment a leadership shows them how. Yeast’s opposition to naming this class for what it is, is redundant and rooted in his own class prejudice, his ignorance of the actual structure of African capitalism, ignorance he half-admits when he concedes he does not have the “data” readily available.
Summarily, these answers address Yeast’s inert confusion. First, the informal mass is not outside the law of value. It is the reserve army that capitalist law throws off, expelled from the land by primitive accumulation and structural adjustment, held in waiting and used to discipline the wage of those in work. Marx already named this category. Secondly, the industrial proletariat’s revolutionary role was never a claim about its numbers. It was a claim about its position, concentrated at the point of production, able to halt the economy and to run it. The working class can be a minority and still lead a revolution, and the Russian revolution is a prime example of this. Yeast has confused the size of a class with its strategic weight, and having confused them, gone hunting for a subject the theory already holds.
The deepest fault in the document is, outrightly, Yeast does not understand dialectical historical materialism, which is the fundamental principle of Marxism. What he practices is an older, cruder conception, i.e. crude materialism, the kind Lenin spat at, that takes a fact as bedrock with no moving parts, whilst dialectical materialism asks how the fact came to be, out of what earlier condition, through what motion, and where it is going.
Yeast tells us that “the capitalism that came to Africa was racial capitalism from the outset,” that race was “not an ideological varnish on an underlying economic logic, but the very mechanism through which that logic operated.” Elsewhere, he says the opposite, that race “originates as ideology rather than as a natural fact,” that its “genesis… is historical and ideological (there is no biological basis for it),” and that only “once manufactured and enforced by the state, it ceased to be merely superstructural and became constitutive of the economic base itself.” This is, however, contradictory, as a thing manufactured partway through a process cannot also stand at that process’s beginning.
Science has already settled that there is no biological basis for “races” of humans. The differences we carry in skin colour, height, facial features are ordinary adaptations of our species to different climates and geographies and nothing deeper. So, what then is race? It is not the same thing as physical difference. Yeast, to his credit, half-concedes this, that race is a social relation, however, he fails to address the essential questions, which any genuine Marxist would ask: if it is not natural, who built it, when, and for what purpose? To answer that we must return to Marxism’s central question: who owns the means of production and who must sell their labour power to survive? Human survival depends on producing the means of life, i.e. food, shelter, the goods and tools we use. Whether the land and tools are held in common by those who work them or monopolised by a few who live off the rest is the root question of every society that has ever existed. Class is the relation between those who own and those who must work.
To see when and why race was built, we have to look at history. The record of capitalism’s first contact with Africa shows that Europeans did not initially engage in racial relations. The Portuguese came for pepper, ivory, gold and a sea route around the Cape to break the Muslim world’s hold on Asia trade. When they reached Benin in the 1480s, they found a sovereign kingdom and treated with it as one. King João II corresponded with the Oba as an equal. Benin sent ambassadors to Lisbon. Oba Esigie learned to read and write Portuguese. When Portugal tried to force Benin by a trade embargo in 1553, Benin traded with the French and Dutch instead and Portugal backed down. This was statecraft between two states in the early formations of capitalism, i.e. mercantile capitalism. There was no racial hierarchy yet because that stage of capital had no need for it.
Race was constructed far later. Plantation capitalism in the Americas needed a huge, stable supply of labour for sugar, tobacco, later cotton and the indigenous populations were being devastated by disease, warfare and overwork. Faced with this labour crisis, European merchants turned to West and Central Africa, where existing systems of warfare, raiding and captive-taking could be harnessed to supply the vast numbers of workers the plantations needed. Africans were targeted first because the concrete structures existed to make their capture and sale possible at the required scale, and because the Atlantic routes linking Europe, Africa and the Americas were already built out for gold, pepper and other goods, not because a finished theory of racial hierarchy is sitting in the minds of European capitalists. The Benin and Oyo empires themselves used slavery and the sale of captives as instruments of their power and revenue, feeding surplus labour into the Atlantic trade through coastal brokers while exploiting peasants at home on class lines. They were willing sellers in a ‘willing buyer’ network.
In the plantation colonies in the Americas, the indentured Europeans and enslaved Africans laboured side by side at the bottom of production, tied by the logic of capitalism and class. However, they revolted together, across colour lines, in the Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676, when they burned the colonial capital to the ground. At that time racial categories were not yet fixed in law. It was this unity of the exploited that the ruling class wanted to break into smithereens, so they drove the construction of a new demarcation, i.e., race, based on the physical differences, because it was easier to identify the black slaves from the white indentured servants, especially when they ran away. Colonial law hardened a colour bar so that the exploited class would never again see itself as one. Once African labour had become central to this system, colonial law and ideology moved to naturalise it. Racial doctrines such as Africans are “inferior”, “suited to the heat”, “naturally fit for bondage” were elaborated to explain and justify what is already being done, and legal colour lines are hardened so that African captives, Indigenous peoples and poor Europeans at the bottom of production do not again discover their shared position and revolt together as they did in Virginia. In other words, Africans were not enslaved because of race, race was finished and fixed in law because Africans are already being enslaved because of capitalism, and capital needs a way to lock that exploitation in place and keep the exploited divided.
That is simply what race is for: a wedge to break a working class that had shown it could unite. A contradiction in the base, a labour system generating unwanted solidarity, produced an instrument in the superstructure, race in law, which then reacted back and reshaped the base into the racial order we know. This is well documented history, and we encourage all readers, especially African Yeast to go verify our claims.
As we have explained, race is created, and with that, Yeast compares its existence to that of money. He says money too is “invented, agreed upon, backed by nothing but collective belief and state power”, yet no one calls it immaterial. This analogy proves our point however, not his. Marxism never says the base of capitalism is money or who happens to hold more of it. Money is simply the universal equivalent; the form value takes when it changes hands. The foundation Marxism identifies is the ownership of the means of production, again, who holds the land, the factory, the machine. To answer that is to answer the class question. Class is the structural relation; money and race both operate on top of that foundation. They shape how the relation appears and how it is managed, but they are not themselves the foundation.
Yeast also claims that in Africa race entered into the “relations of production themselves”, so that land was alienated by race, labour priced by race, and the value relation could not operate without it. This confuses the content of a class relation with the form it was made to take. Ownership of the means of production is the relation, whilst race was the administrative instrument by which a particular ruling class assigned people to split the exploited side against itself. If you change the instrument, that relation still stands. Where no colour or ‘race’ bar exists, capital will divide the same proletariat class by ethnicity, region, religion, passport or papers, etc, because capital needs divisions to exist. Race is therefore a constitutive tool of a specific class formation, not of the base. Race explains how the African working class was assembled and kept divided. It is not a second determinant seated beside ownership, and to raise it to co equal standing is to mindlessly mistake the weapon for the hand that swings it.
A devil’s advocate will say “but under colonialism it was white Europeans who owned the capital and ran the state, and even today imperialist capital from Europe and North America still dominates Africa, so race must be more than a tool.” What this proves is that in one historical stage the ruling class in Africa was drawn largely from Europe and marked by colour. Before that stage, Africa already had ruling and exploited classes of its own. Feudal and tributary formations in Ethiopia, Buganda, Dahomey, Ashanti and across the Sahel extracted surplus from peasants on class lines long before the arrival of imperialism. This is well documented, even by Walter Rodney, who Yeast relies on in his polemic. When imperialism came, it did not invent class, it bent those relations to its own purposes and created new bourgeois and petty-bourgeois layers tied to the world market. Today imperialist capital still dominates Africa at the global level through banks, corporations, trade and debt, and the African ruling classes still dominate African workers and peasants at the local level. Since Africa already had ruling and exploited classes of its own before Europe arrived, then the task is not to fight ‘race’ in the abstract but to fight the concrete class system that now takes its highest and most global form as capitalism. To fight class rule today is to fight capitalism, because capitalism is the foremost, world-wide concretisation of a class society.
The colour of the local exploiter and local exploited is often the same. According to Yeast, if race was a second determinant equal to ownership, this continuity would be impossible and the relation would vanish. It does not, however. That is the point. Race and imperialism are constitutive tools of the African capitalist formation, the specific way capital organises and manages exploitation here; but the basic relation remains the same, i.e., a ruling class owning the means of production and state power, and a working class forced to sell its labour to live. Mistaking the tool for the engine is to swing at the shadows, missing the real villain.
Yeast’s own example, the apartheid mine, confirms this. A black miner and a white miner both own nothing but their labour power and both sell it to the same company. The company splits them, pays the white worker more, gives him the overseer’s post, and sends the black worker below for a fraction of the wage. However, that does not change the relation or the rules of capital. Lenin named this tactic long ago as the creation of a labour aristocracy. Yeast is right that the two miners occupy different material positions, he is wrong about what produces the difference. The company does not pay the white miner more out of some racial essence it carried from Europe. It pays him more because a workforce split against itself is cheaper and safer to rule than one that closes ranks, and race is the easiest line to split it along in that context.
If race is empty in nature and absent at the outset, then Yeast’s call of capitalism racial “from the outset” amounts to saying Europeans arrived already racist by the simple fact of being Europeans. He almost says so openly. He defends a comrade who claimed that “European culture carries a supremacist character that predates capitalism and is not guaranteed to dissolve” even after a workers’ victory, and treats the criticism of that view as a wrong. That is simply racial essentialism which writes a people’s character into them before and beyond their material conditions. It is the same logic that says Africans are eternally inferior, but this time, it has the signs swapped. You cannot fight racial idealism with a reverse racial idealism and call it Marxism.
Yeast also argues that a Black man may be prejudiced, a bigot, even a chauvinist, but can never be “institutionally racist supremacist” because the present world structure grants him no institutional power over another race. This definition has nothing to say about an African elite’s power over African workers: the power to set their wages, seize their land, send the police against them, starve their protests. It treats race as the only dividing line, as though Africa were one undivided mass rather than dozens of states, each with its own ruling apparatus and each capable of turning that apparatus against a group inside its own borders. Ethnic and regional domination inside African states is well documented, all black, all backed by police, courts and budgets, none of it needing a white man in the room. Race is not doing the work here. Yeast’s definition, strictly along racial lines, was never built to see the whole structure that oppresses Africans, only the part that fits his thesis. This is not Marxism.
We refuse to shift the centre of our politics from class exploitation to a tally of which race holds more power at which moment. The African worker is oppressed by imperial capital and by African capital, and both must be fought on class lines. We do not deny that oppression on the imposed racial line is real. On the contrary, we insist it is one of the sharpest weapons the ruling class has ever forged for splitting the workers of the world into hostile camps instead of one camp against one enemy, the capitalist class. Lenin, faced with a similar problem on the national question, asked one key question: does organising along this line weld the exploited together or deepen the division made by the enemy? If we apply that question to Yeast’s programme, the answer is obvious. He would have the exploited of Africa unite as a race with the same class of people who exploit them, because they share a colour, against Europeans.
Or is he saying that the African ruling class cease to be Africans by virtue of their class, because they exploit other Africans? Is his programme that if you are exploited you belong to one race and if you exploit you belong to another? He cannot have it both ways. Either race is the bond that unites all Africans, in which case it binds the worker to the comprador who robs him, and his programme dissolves into a united front with the exploiter. Or class cuts across race, in which case race was never the primary line to begin with. Once forced to choose, his framework falls apart.
To fight capitalism is to fight racism, because capitalism needs the division to live. The fight against racism must therefore be carried on inside the fight of the whole class in every genuine struggle. The Marxists hit racism harder than the Pan-Africanists do, because we know what it is for. It is the wedge capital hammers into the world working class to keep it from closing ranks and the wall imperialism builds around the continent to keep it weak. We strike the wedge to weld the class into one fist, and we strike the capitalist wall to set that fist free.
Yeast again shows he does not understand how capitalism produced the comprador any better than he understands how it produced race. He writes that “the comprador is not imperialism’s partner. It is imperialism’s creature… The comprador has no existence without imperialism. Strip the imperial relation away, and there is no comprador left at all.” He says the comprador “did not develop organically from merchant capital to industrial capital” but “emerged largely as an administrative and intermediary layer within the colonial and neocolonial state apparatus.” He extends this past the comprador to Nigerian capital as such, writing that even Dangote, “the most visible figure of Nigerian capital, does not manufacture in the full sense of the word,” because Nigerian capital’s “returns flow not from production but from the middleman position itself.” And he generalises the whole claim to China, writing that the “treaty-port comprador class… did not survive the severing of the imperialist relation post-1949… precisely because it was, like its African counterpart, existentially dependent rather than autonomous.”
In essence, Yeast is saying that Africans are capitalists only because imperialists made them so, and that once the imperial cord is cut the comprador simply vanishes, leaving Africa to either real socialism or, at least, a national bourgeoisie free to develop the productive forces the comprador never could. This is false. Capitalism is not a set of national economies standing side by side, each free to decide whether to enter the world market. It is a single global system, driven by its own laws to expand, to hunt new markets, new fields of investment, new sources of raw material wherever it can reach. That compulsion is not something inflicted on Africa from outside. It is what capitalism is, everywhere, once it matures. We have already shown that Africa had ruling and exploited classes long before Europe arrived, and that imperialism did not invent class but bent those relations to its own purposes and tied them into the world market. Yeast takes this normal global motion of capital and mistakes it for a special foreign intrusion, as if capitalism lived in some pure, un-globalised form elsewhere and only reached Africa through a colonial umbilical cord. In reality, what he calls intrusion is simply how mature capitalism expands: it turns existing class structures into a periphery and reshapes their upper layers into a comprador intermediary for imperial capital.
Yes, the African comprador bourgeoisie was shaped and reoriented by imperialism, but any ruling class, once formed, develops its own material interests, property relations and mechanisms of reproduction. The African bourgeoisie today owns land and banks, controls retail, telecom and construction capital, sits in states and defends its interests in courts. Yeast’s logic has already been tested and refuted by history. Ghana under Nkrumah expelled much of the colonial economic apparatus and still produced, and was ultimately overthrown by, a domestic ruling class defending its own interests. Zimbabwe, after 1980, broke decisively with the settler-colonial state, and the ruling class that followed did not dissolve; it entrenched itself through land seizure and patronage, becoming a domestic tyranny answerable to no outside imperial hand. Angola, after the MPLA’s victory over Portugal and its proxies, did not see the comprador vanish with colonialism’s defeat; a new domestic elite, tied to oil rents, stepped directly into the space imperialism had supposedly vacated. In every one of these cases the imperial relation was cut, loosened or defeated outright, and the ruling class did not disappear. It survived, adapted and, in many cases, simply changed which foreign patron it aligned with next. Strip the imperial relation away, by Yeast’s own logic, and the comprador should vanish. History has run that experiment at least three times on this continent and three times the class survived.
Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development explains this. A backward country pulled into world capitalism does not fail to produce a bourgeoisie; it produces one unevenly, weak and dependent and fused with older forms, which is precisely why that bourgeoisie proves too compromised to carry through its own revolution and why the working class must lead in its place. What makes this class “comprador” is its structural position in the international division of labour, and that position is not unique to Africa. Even Yeast’s own China example contradicts him. China’s treaty-port comprador layer did not evaporate because imperialism was “severed”. It was struck down on class lines, by the Communist Party leaning on peasants and workers to expropriate bureaucratic and comprador capital by name and by defeating the Kuomintang, the nationalist party. Class struck against class! To cite China as proof and never mention that it was destroyed by revolution against its own bourgeoisie is either ignorance of the history or a decision not to tell it straight. Either way, the single case he offers refutes him.
Additionally, the capitalists of the European Union are as organic to Europe as any bourgeoisie in history, yet they are subordinate to United States capital and increasingly to Chinese supply chains in precisely the entangled, dependent position Yeast says reduces the African comprador to a mere creature of imperialism. No bourgeoisie on earth stands outside the world system of finance capital today. A European agricultural bourgeoisie, an oil magnate or a manufacturing baron operates within a world web of prices, exchange rates, dollar-denominated debt, IMF conditions and interlocking ownership structures that are not of their making and which they cannot exit at will. If dependence on a stronger external power strips a class of the name of a real capitalist class and leaves it a mere “creature”, then Yeast’s definition unmakes half the bourgeoisies of the world.
Yeast also fails to ask what stands beside the comprador in Africa’s own class structure. He mentions the “African petty bourgeoisie” once, in passing, but never analyses its position. In Nigeria that stratum is not a footnote. It is the trader marking up necessities the worker must buy, inserting himself as a compulsory toll between production and consumption. It is the professional gatekeeping school places, medical care, market licenses, extracting rent from workers who have no alternative and producing nothing to justify the toll. It is the small contractor and lower civil servant living off positional access to state licenses and contracts. On top of this, the lumpen layers that live off crime, extortion and the plunder of the state go unmentioned altogether. They are the thugs collecting tax at the motor park, the area boys preying on market traders, the criminal networks running bunkering and kidnapping whose money flows upward into the pockets of the political bourgeoisie, the same thugs the bourgeoisie hires at every election to terrorise the poor and break up the organised working class.
These classes feed on Nigerian and African workers directly, with no foreign contract behind them. Their exploitation is entirely internal, sustained by local property relations and local power. By Yeast’s logic neither should exist, but they do, and they stand as proof that he does not understand the real structure of African societies. There is no predominant European ruling class in Africa today. Dangote is not a white man. The banker, the landlord, the contractor fattening on oil money, the politician plundering the treasury are all from the continent. So, who exactly is the revolutionary youth in Accra supposed to march against, the Europeans in far Europe or their ruling class?
Yeast’s answer is that “the primary contradiction in Africa today is not, principally, the African worker against the African bourgeoisie considered in isolation. It is the African people, across their internal class fractions, against imperialism as the global system that produces and sustains that very class structure.” The practical meaning is that such a youth must unite “across internal class fractions”, i.e., march beside the very ruling class that robs him, and wait for a later stage before he is permitted to notice the African hand in his pocket. This programme ties the exploited to the exploiter in the name of race and imperialism and postpones class struggle to an indefinite future. By any serious Marxist measure, it is worth less than nothing.
Now to who is a “Supermarxist,” a point that is, frankly, hilarious, given the verdict Yeast tries to hang on members of the Naija Marxists. He argues, with Marx’s remark to Paul Lafargue, “what is certain is that I am not a Marxist,” and waves it as proof that we should not be rigid either. We as Marxists agree with this, completely. Marxism is a living breathing theory that should be applied to the diverse material conditions of humans around the world. The context he however omits from that quote was aimed at French followers who had frozen Marx’s living method into a fixed formula and were citing it as scripture. It was Marx objecting to dogma, not licensing looseness.
Yeast borrows his central label from Opoku Agyeman, who used “Supermarxist” against the Dar es Salaam school for allegedly placing “rigid, orthodox Marxism above the concrete concerns of Pan-African liberation.” Agyeman’s own argument holds that race is a more decisive contradiction than class for Black people, and that a unified Pan-African state, socialist if possible, capitalist if necessary, is the “first order of business” before internationalism becomes realistic. That is a race-first, nation-first political line dressed in Marxist vocabulary, exactly the “bourgeois Black power” Agyeman himself was willing to accept as second best. Yeast has borrowed his own critics’ framework wholesale and calls it a return to concrete analysis.
So what, in the end, is a Supermarxist? From what we have shown, this simply means a Marxist who applies the Marxist method of analysis to Africa, who insists on asking who owns the means of production even when the owner is black, and who refuses to trade the class question for a racial one. What Yeast calls Supermarxism is what everybody else calls Marxism. And if that is the charge, if that is what it means to be a Supermarxist, we plead to be completely guilty.
Yeast attaches claims to us under the label “Trotskyist-Internationalist” that Trotsky never made, a clear sign he has never engaged with any Trotsky text. Whilst we will not spend this whole text defending Trotsky, it is pertinent to draw out the falsities:
He claims Trotsky held that class is “always and everywhere” the primary contradiction. Class is present in every society past the primitive commune, that much is bedrock. But “always and everywhere primary” is a different, stronger claim, and it is not Trotsky’s. Had Yeast actually read Trotsky, he would have found the one place Trotsky came closest to his own claim and stretched past it. On the Negro Question, Trotsky backed black self-organisation in the United States, even a separate black state if black workers chose it, precisely because Jim Crow segregation and lynch terror had, in practice, forged Black America into a distinct oppressed nationality. But he bound that concession to a condition, i.e., self-organisation under a revolutionary programme, led toward class unity, never race as a permanent principle in itself. Even at his most concessive, Trotsky never granted race co-equal standing with class. Yeast claims Trotsky says race is “a distraction from the real motor of history.” Trotsky never said or wrote those words. The claim is maliciously invented, and we wonder why.
He claims that Trotsky says the correct organisational form is a party “oriented to the formal proletariat” alone, however, permanent revolution is precisely the theory of how a minority proletariat leads the peasant and urban poor majority, not a theory that ignores them. Invariably, Yeast again is wrong.
Yeast claims Trotsky held Pan-Africanism to be bourgeois nationalism serving the petty bourgeoisie. Trotsky supported colonial and national liberation struggles consistently, while insisting the proletariat lead them rather than trail behind the native bourgeoisie.
He claims anti-imperialist governments outside this form are to be “opposed or withheld solidarity from.” This inverts Lenin’s actual position which is the conditional support for the genuine anti-imperialist movements.
Trotsky’s permanent revolution says that for poor, late-developing countries, their local capitalist class is weak, arrives late into global capitalism, and is tied by money and interest to imperialism and to the big landowners, so they will not finish the job of developing the productive forces. The working class must lead the mass of peasants and urban poor, keep its own party and its own banner throughout, and carry the fight from the democratic tasks into the socialist ones without a pause, because no other class has reason to see it through. Yeast does not understand this, or has not read Trotsky, and his untethered clamorous criticisms show so.
What Yeast is proposing Africans should do is the old and defunct theory of stagism, which history has tried and ended up in blood. In China between 1925 and 1927 the Communists worked with the Kuomintang in the name of anti-imperialist unity. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek turned on them and massacred the workers of Shanghai. This was replicated in Spain, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Sudan and it is the same absurdity Yeast is preaching to the Naija Marxists as a progressive history. Permanent revolution warns precisely against this surrender. Are we not to learn from history? Yet, Yeast calls this caution “dogmatism.” It would be laughable, if not starkly sad.
His treatment of internationalism also suffers the same defect, and for the same reason. He lists the collapse of the Second International in 1914, the AFL-CIO’s Cold War collusion with the CIA, French Communist opposition to Algerian independence, and concludes that “proletarian internationalism, as actually practised, has repeatedly failed.” Every one of these examples is a betrayal by opportunist and social-chauvinist leaderships, precisely the kind of leadership Lenin spent his life fighting (i.e., read up on the German Social Democrats and the war credits in World War 1). This is not a verdict on internationalism but a verdict on leaders who chose pragmatism at the expense of principles and undermined their own theory. When the Naija Marxists refuse that path, we are not being “dogmatic”, we are defending the only basis on which international solidarity can be built.
Yeast asks what solidarity can exist between a Palestinian worker in Gaza and an Israeli worker in Tel Aviv “on the basis of shared class position alone” and concludes that solidarity across that line is structurally impossible, so African workers should retreat to a purely Pan-African horizon. Marx faced the same pattern with English and Irish workers and drew the opposite conclusion: that the English working class “would never accomplish anything until it made common cause with Irish national emancipation.” Difficult solidarity is not proof that internationalism is a Western indulgence. It is proof that internationalism has to be built against the very obstacles Yeast uses to declare it impossible.
The worker of an oppressor nation and the worker of an oppressed nation do not stand in the same position, and pretending otherwise is not internationalism. The obstacle is not the Palestinian’s national consciousness but the Tel Aviv worker’s failure to repudiate the privileges his own bourgeoisie hands him. Lenin therefore placed the demand where it belongs, on the oppressor-nation worker, never on the oppressed worker to dissolve himself into an abstraction as the price of admission. What Yeast calls structural impossibility, Lenin called abstract internationalism: theory used as cover for political inaction.
Lenin’s labour-aristocracy thesis explains why sections of the Western working class have been bribed with a share of imperial super-profits. Yeast inflates a historically specific, materially explained betrayal into a permanent law of nature, then has to smuggle Cuba’s soldiers in Angola into a footnote as an embarrassing exception. Internationalism is not a Western indulgence on paper. It has appeared in practice, imperfectly, in African struggles. Cuban troops fought and died in Angola against South African invasion; Cuban support helped defeat apartheid forces at Cuito Cuanavale and shift the balance of power in southern Africa, a role Mandela himself acknowledged. Global proletariat solidarity networks backed the anti-apartheid struggle with boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and unions and student movements across the world took action against companies and governments that supported apartheid. During the Nigerian Civil War, humanitarian organisations organised the Biafra airlift, one of the largest civilian relief operations in history, flying food and medicine at night into blockaded Biafran territory.
More recently, African and international union federations have issued solidarity statements and practical support for workers’ strikes and protests in South Africa, Sudan and across the continent. None of these came from imperial ruling classes. They were acts of solidarity by workers, popular movements and an oppressed state. They show that internationalism is possible and real; the question is how to deepen and discipline it under a Marxist programme, not whether to declare it impossible in advance.
So who profits from Yeast’s despair? Every ruling class on earth wants exactly what he proposes: workers who stay fragmented, each convinced the others are unreachable, none able to name the common enemy. The apartheid regime wanted Black South Africans cut off from global solidarity; the Nigerian ruling class wanted starving Biafrans isolated; Sudan’s warlords want the same today. Yeast’s counsel hands them that fragmentation and calls it realism. The obstacles to internationalism are manufactured by the same system that manufactures the exploitation, and tearing them down is part of the work of tearing down the system itself.
On Traoré, Yeast is right that a government’s material direction against imperialism deserves recognition, and we give it, driving out French troops, breaking ties with France are real steps. But Lenin’s actual position is to back the nationalists only so far as they do not obstruct the independent organisation of the working class. His debate with M.N. Roy on the colonial question settled exactly this: communist support for national liberation and the independent organisation of the working class are not sequential, one to be granted now and the other promised later, they are simultaneous obligations, and neither may be dissolved into the other. Once you remove that condition, as Yeast does, support becomes a blank cheque for any strongman/dictator.
Yeast’s charge is not that we misjudge Traoré but that our critique serves Paris. This is synonymous to saying if you correct your brother, you are supporting his enemy; how ludicrous. France attacks Traoré to restore its own domination, we press him to break further from it, not just France but global imperialism, and let the working class organise as its own force while. Imperialism opposes the anti-imperialist to end the anti-imperialism, we critique him to finish it. Why? because, again, Africa’s history is filled with leaders that did not do so, and the people in those countries ended back where they started, in poverty, exploitation and suffering. Those that do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.
Yeast thinks he has trapped us saying judge governments by whether they are a formal workers’ state and France, with its elections and courts, outranks Traoré. But that is a liberal procedural standard and it has never been ours as Marxists. We judge a government by two things at once: its direction against imperialist extraction and whether it permits the working class to organise independently. Traoré says he is advancing the first only against France and, so far, fails the second. The Naija Marxists movement have called out the limits of Traoré’s anti-imperialist movement (taking aid from the IMF, banning student and workers’ movements, failing to attack capitalist property relations in Burkina Faso) and a full report will be done in the nearest future on this question. A critique is not support for imperialism. As Marxists, we have to learn from history, and African history has shown leaders like Traoré over and over again. The sensationalism around him does not mean we cannot call out his limits in the name of “pragmatism”.
Does saying all these make us less African, less Pan-African? Au contraire! It is the genuine Marxists, not the Pan-Africanists, who are the true internationalists of the continent, because our struggle was never bounded at Nigeria’s borders. We fight for Bamako and Ouagadougou and Nairobi as much as for Lagos, on class lines, because the capital that robs the Nigerian worker is the same capital, organised across the same borders, robbing his counterpart in every other African state and beyond that, the world. Nationalism, however radical its costume, cannot build a communist future. History has already run that experiment and failed.
Pan-Africanism has no progressive role to play so long as it is built on African virtue, race, culture, ethics and identity. This is not a guess about the future; the experiment was already ran and failed from the 1950s. Pan-Africanists were progressive against colonisation in their moment, and we grant that, but these were nationalist struggles at bottom, struggles the working class should have pushed beyond and did not. That is the content of Pan-Africanism’s failure, and the Pan-Africanists have discredited themselves since, especially with their racial ideas. Nkrumah is the clearest case. He argued that the primary contradiction in Africa was imperialism, not class, and treated class division as essentially a colonial import into a communal Africa. That theoretical Pan-Africanism guided his actions and had brutal consequences. His party won independence, then captured the trade unions and tied them to the state, broke the Sekondi-Takoradi railway workers when they protested against his scathing policies, and ruled by preventive detention. When the coup came in 1966, the working class he had disarmed and made docile could not defend him. In exile, he wrote Class Struggle in Africa, conceding at last that an African bourgeoisie exists and must be fought as a class. He learned it too late, and still blamed the coup on foreign hands rather than on the class contradictions he had refused to address while in power.
The wider project of African socialism, the poetry of an “African essence”, ran the same course with coups, debt, the comprador sitting firmly in charge. The OAU became a club of heads of state covering for one another and the United States of Africa never came. The later generation of Pan-Africanist heads of state also confirms this pattern. Robert Mugabe was hailed as a liberation hero and a staunch Pan-Africanist who insisted that African resources must belong to Africans. In power he presided over the violent seizure of land, the handing of farms and diamond fields to his cronies, hyperinflation, mass unemployment and the flight of millions of Zimbabweans. Paul Kagame is praised as a modern Pan-African reformer, yet Rwandan troops and M23 rebels backed by Rwanda have repeatedly invaded and occupied parts of eastern Congo, looting minerals and deepening war and crisis in the very continent Pan-Africanism claims to unite. Yoweri Museveni presents himself as a stabilising Pan-African figure, but decades of his rule in Uganda have brought systematic torture, abductions and repression of opposition and activists, with detailed evidence of abuses. When Thomas Sankara was assassinated in 1987 for taking a genuinely anti-imperialist and pro-worker line in Burkina Faso, the OAU existed and Pan-African leaders were in office. No serious collective action materialised to carry his programme forward, there was no collective response to the atrocity. Pan-Africanism as practised at the level of heads of state did not save him; it stood aside while a militant socialist was removed.
We must be exact here. We are not against workers in Lagos linking arms with workers in Nairobi. We are for it, and we are for the same worker linking arms with dockers in Marseille and Shanghai, because the capital that robs these workers is global. What we propose is proletarian internationalism, and we are wholly for it. We can have unity with Pan-Africanists where and when that unity advances the proletarian struggle, but not at the cost of our Marxist theory and analysis. That would be a counter-programme, not a step forward. What we reject is the shapeless programme Yeast presents, a cross-class unity of Africans as a race in which the Nigerian worker is told to fall in behind the Nigerian billionaire because they share a skin colour. Respectable Marxists have no reason to walk back into that grave.
What we have, as Marxists, is confidence in the revolutionary force of the African working class and that confidence is not blind. The revolutionary consciousness rising across this continent is not organising on race lines but on class lines, and the evidence is in Nigeria, in Kenya, in Madagascar, in Morocco. To tell these young people their enemy is the white man would be a lie and a defeatist conception. The very countries where these young people have carried out revolutionary movements were struggles against African and Arab elites, not Europeans. What does Yeast even mean by organising on race lines? Is he suggesting our programme should declare that our enemies are Europeans, who themselves face growing revolutionary struggles inside their own countries? That is not a serious political programme.
This is why we refuse to dilute our politics for a warm feeling. Lassalle wrote to Marx in 1852 that the government was glad to watch revolutionaries attack one another, hoping “the revolutionaries will cut one another’s throats”, never understanding that internal party struggle “lends a party strength and vitality”, that a party’s weakness shows in “the blurring of clear demarcations”, and that a party grows stronger by purging itself. Drawing those demarcations and keeping them clear is a serious revolutionary organisation survives. Yeast pleaded loudest against schisms and then chose to leave the Movement. We do not chase after him. An organisation is stronger for an honest parting than for a unity bought by blurring what it stands for. Better fewer but better.
For all its length, Yeast’s document builds nothing. It spends twenty pages arguing who should lead the African revolution, admits it lacks the data to say, and offers no party form and no transitional programme. Measured by the actual direction of motion, he is not advancing the movement but reversing it: instead of raising racial and national consciousness up to class consciousness under proletarian leadership, he lowers the movement to meet the masses where they already stand. The wider tent he proposes is regression, swapping the Marxist content the masses need for the nationalist form they already carry, and walking them back toward a dead end.
Marxism is revolutionary science. It is a set of real laws that were discovered rather than invented, and we as Marxists carry it into every corner of the real world without exception. If arming ourselves with revolutionary science to break the owning class and every religious, ethnic, and racial chain it has ever forged in Nigeria, in Africa, and in the world, is what earns the name, Supermarxists, then let it be so.
We take the name and wear it in the open. Stitch the S on our chests like the old comic hero and let everyone see it.