On the 1st Pro-democracy Conference & the 1998 Democratic Alternative Convention: setting the record straight

First, I wish to commend Social Action and AFRICMIL for initiating the annual “pro-democracy conference” series. I do believe, like many activists, that these conferences provide us opportunity to reflect on our collective past (in the struggle against military dictatorship) and present, towards enriching our perspectives on what is to be done, towards conquering the battle for democracy. It has thus within just a few years become probably the most important vehicle for inter-generational discourse on past, present and future of pro-democratic struggles in Nigeria.

Such reflections which the discourse entails for us to draw lessons from our past and formulate ideas for our future battles, does naturally involve debates. And debates, particularly on our recent history would of course encompass (different) interpretations of what and what transpired and the significance of these. The 1^st conference which was held in 2018 was, I gathered, one which involved heated debates on what transpired twenty years earlier and the significance of this for the shape of the current Republic vis-à-vis the Left.

I was not privy to the organising of that conference. A few weeks after though, someone brought a commentary of Godwin Frank on Facebook to my attention. This was titled “convention as de-mystification of party autocrats” and was a follow up to an earlier piece by J. Gaskie titled “1998: a watershed year”. In Frankie’s piece, apart from a trend of falsification which ran through the articles of both of them, he also called me out by name with false allegations of regarding my role at the Democratic Alternative’s 1998 Convention held at Port Harcourt.

There was a subsequent article on the same subject by Gaskie, titled “returning to 1998”, in which he correctly pointed out the need for left forces to take responsibility for their actions and equally learn to work together. He also claimed that he had taken “full responsibility” for his own role in 1998 while claiming that “some from our platform…. have been prepared to recant their role without taking responsibility for their actions”.

At the time, I could see that it was important to respond to the falsifications that dripped from almost every pore of these articles. But it was near impossible for me to immediately do so, considering more urgent tasks I was saddled with. Somethings might be important and not necessarily urgent, whilst others were both important and urgent.

The need for such response as I now make is not simply for setting the records straight particularly as my name had been falsely invoked. It also has to do with drawing the correct lessons from what transpired. Faulty diagnosis cannot but lead to the wrong prognosis. Besides, one cannot truly claim to take full responsibility on the basis of falsification. The first condition of accepting responsibility is to come out truthfully about what one is supposed to be taking responsibility for.

There are two things I would want to stress here before going further. First, I am dwelling specifically on the DA “Pending (Motel) Convention” of 22-23 August 1998 and not the entirety of 1998 as indeed a watershed year. Second is the fact that, I am not unaware of the fact that this article could likely result in the issues it raises being set aside for vacuous accusations of “personal” attacks. I have done my best to be as non-polemical as I can. But as revolutionaries we must hold ourselves to account by standards not less than those with which we hold the oppressors to account. Arguments should be buttressed as much as possible with evidence.

Where and when falsifications are torn asunder for what they are, such actions should not be taken as personal attacks. Indeed, such tasks are themselves not only political but decidedly revolutionary. For, as Antonio Gramsci points out “to tell the truth is revolutionary”.

The key issue in contention – the question of transition(s)

There were a few issues in contention at the Convention. But the key line of division, as J. Gaskie equally accepts, was what should be the orientation of DA to the General Abubakar transition programme. According to him the DA bureaucracy “proposed engagement with the transition program and participation in the process without preconditions, and in particular without the insistence of the convening of a Sovereign National Conference [SNC] or any National Conference”.

And the second current which supposedly had “a majority among the state chapters and membership of the DA, agreed with the proposal to engage with and participate in the transition program, but was insistent that the demand for SNC should not be dropped…” This supposed position of the second current was based on the argument (1) “that the mass movement was in ascendancy…..” (2) “that the ruling class was in disarray” & (3) “there was the possibility of the NADECO and pro national conference wing of the ruling class coming over to back us” (all italics mine, BA).

We will first look at the arguments which are supposed to have served as the bases of the second current’s position.

First, the mass movement was indeed in ascendancy - in the first half of 1998. And NADECO & co were ready to and did collaborate with the radical pro-democracy movement at this period. But few people who lived through that period would agree that there was disarray within the ruling class after the transition programme was unfurled, in the wake of the deaths of both Abiola and Abacha.

At the time of the convention, there was a solid sense of unity and renewed confidence on the part of the ruling class. We must remember that this was the period of the G34 which brought all factions of the ruling class together and constituted a committee on 13^th August, which gave birth to the PDP a week or so after the DA Convention. Thus, even the differences that threw up first ANPP and then AD had not yet surfaced.

And it might be asked that what was the general mood of the working masses at the time? After years of, first IBB’s “hidden agenda” transition and Abacha’s despotism, there was an eagerness to at last move on to civilian “democratic” rule. This point, which reflected the reality on the ground, was time and again pointed out by the by DA bureaucracy. And in an article written by J. Gaskie in November of the same year, he noted that the Abubakar transition programme was greeted with mass “euphoria”.

To square the circle of reality, J. Gaskie even claimed that Tunji Braithwaite and Comrade Ola Oni came to the Convention as a NADECO delegation. This is nothing but an insult on the memory of Comrade Ola Oni. Baba rather spoke to the Convention on behalf of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA). This was a united front the SRV was trying to forge and wanted DA/UAD to be part of. Braithwaite on his own part was trying to rebuild his National Advanced Party and wanted to forge an alliance with DA for this.

Now let us look at what we are told was the position of the second current. An important question to ask is was it possible to simultaneously insist on the SNC “as the mechanism to have a national conversation and midwife the fourth republic” and “engage with and participate in the transition program”? I don’t think so, nor do I think any logical thinking could lead to concurring with this.

The fact, as captured in an article written by J. Gaskie in November is that the SNC was presented as “an alternative transition”. The article equally pointed out that “no government however benevolent will convene the SNC for us”. It was clearly an insurrectionary programme. 

This article was one of four he published in the single issue (November/December 1998) People’s Democracy, organ of the People’s Democratic Liberation Party on the Convention and the SNC. One of the other articles titled “Convention as Revolution” (my earlier description of the 7^th-8^th May 1994 NANS Convention at OAU Ife) speaks much more honestly about the position of the second current than what we would be told twenty years later, thus:

“The bureaucratic trend canvassed for the abandonment of the insurrectionary campaign to convene the SNC and thus precipitate the Nigerian Revolution. In its stead they insisted on taking part in, to the extent of even contesting elections, in the Abubakar transition programme.

The mass revolutionary trend however rejected this line and canvassed for the intensification of the organised self-conscious activity of the masses, the militant mass democratic actions, the independent convening of the SNC. In short, the deepening of the revolutionary crises to create the conducive atmosphere for the triumph of the Nigerian Revolution.”

The significant difference here thus does not hinge on the quality and character of the transition program. Rather it is one of counterposing an insurrectionary transition programme towards insurrectionary convoking of an SNC to any form of involvement in the transition programme initiated by the military. It was a difference of two distinct transition programmes. And within the context of that particular point in time, the seemingly more “mass revolutionary trend’s” perspective was decidedly ultra-left.

Revolutionaries and revolutionary organisations can and do make mistakes. That is not the problem here. The problem for is to then try to distort the details of what happened whilst claiming to take responsibility. This is politically dishonest.

It is not a crime to have been wrong

To be clear, as revolutionaries we want the overthrow of the current order. SNC as a formula is in itself bourgeois democratic (and which DA, unlike CD & NCP had de-emphasized in its Liberation Charter and politics, for a more frontal view on contest for power). But the point of departure for our strategy and tactics ought to be a clearheaded and concrete analysis of concrete reality. Was the position of this “second current” based on such analysis at the time? I daresay it was not – and a few of us in the revolutionary current pointed it out.

In the course of the Convention, we held a meeting of the May 31^st Movement (M31M), our group which was the driving force behind this revolutionary current. I vehemently opposed this ultra-left position. My proposal on participation in the transition was however not a carte blanche. I argued that we should call for Convention to demand a scrapping of the anti-democratic regulations for participation as part of a campaign to take participation beyond electoralist ends.

I also pointed out that we should learn from the NANS debacle of 1995 on organisational capacity. We had stormed out of the 24^th – 25^th August 1995 Convention at Kongo. Whilst in the bus, heading back to Lagos, most comrades expressed the view that we set up a faction of NANS. This to me did not make sense for many reasons.

One of these was that, in the one month since a NANS faction emerged on 22^nd July at Ago Iwoye, each time I would go to a press house with a press statement (as NANS PRO), the first thing I would be asked was “which of the factions are you from”. Another was that the emergent mainstream NANS obviously had state resources while the splinter body had the support of both the CDHR and CLO. If we were to go ahead with a new faction, we would at best have just the limited resources of the University of Lagos. Almost all the other otherwise strong unions which were part of this discussion, such as OAU Ife were already under attack, including proscription.

Instead of a lame-duck NANS faction I made two suggestions. The first and which I was more predisposed to was to draw from the effort of setting up a NANS-Revolutionary Faction after the January 1992 NANS Convention (though the NANS-RF was largely still born) and build a faction within the mainstream NANS. The other, if we were convinced we could not be part of the mainstream NANS was to form a new body altogether i.e., a Congress of Nigerian Students (CONS). Both suggestions were jettisoned for a “resumption of Convention” at Unilag on 6^th September. But reality dawned on us all as the unions that participated made it clear that they would not be part of a new faction. The NANS-Solidarity Front then constituted at that last minute ended up a still birth like the NANS-RF.

After hours of deliberation, in which I did a yeoman’s job to try swing the view of my comrades with these arguments, we took a vote. It was 6 against 2, the ultra-left view carried the day. But flowing from my flashback to NANS (it was obvious that we were headed to a split in the DA with this stand and on the other aligned issue of slating which we will get to below), Gaskie agreed that we had to avoid the mistake of just being a “DA faction” and turned to me to make suggestions for a name.

I was convinced that we had reached a wrong decision. But I had full respect for the internal democratic process that led to it. I thus had no problem with making two suggestions. The first was to still hold on to the DA identity, as the authentic spirit of its founding in 1994, whilst showing the difference of what emerged. This was Democratic Alternative Party of Workers & Youths for Liberation (DAPWYL). The other was People’s Democratic Liberation Party (PDLP). While it was acknowledged that the acronym of the first was easily pronounceable as well as laying our claim of continuity from what had been DA, it was considered too long as a name. We thus settled on PDLP. 

As expected, the DA bureaucracy walked out on the Convention which reconstituted itself as the founding conference of the PDLP. J. Gaskie was elected President and I was elected General Secretary. The party simply atrophied within a few months.

On delegates, state chapters and slating

Frankie & Gaskie also spoke eloquently about the mass turnout of comrades for the Convention and the question of slating. There is a need to look closer at these two aspects of the watershed DA Convention and the related claim of our having a majority of the state chapters on our side.

Turnout for the Convention was no doubt impressive. There were at least 150 to 200 persons present. This reflected the commendable work which the two comrades and others in Port Harcourt had done, in the Niger delta. The bulk of this large number were from Akwa Ibom (almost all of whom were from the University of Uyo) and Bayelsa states.

The position that “we had a majority of state chapters” or allied with us, is however a myth. Most of the chapters outside the South South were with the party bureaucracy. However, many of these had only few members. And further, quite a significant number of them could not even meet up with their quota of delegates, due largely to transport cost. I remember there were some “1-man branch” delegations.

But while we had just a few state chapters with us, we had the advantage of mass mobilisation into these chapters and of Convention location. Akwa-Ibom and Bayelsa states (and of course the hosting Rivers state, where J.Gaskie was party chair) constituted our support base. And it was specifically these two states that the “autocrats” as G.Frankie describes the DA bureaucracy refused to grant recognition, saying they had not been duly constituted by the national leadership.

Before going on to the more substantive issue of slating, it is necessary to examine G.Frankie’s distortion of my role. According to him:

These autocrats were bent on demobilising the masses because they have no organic link with them, will not be able to control them like puppets and were afraid the masses will bloom, like 'flame of forest'! For same reason of lack of organic link; some of our leading tendency cadres like Baba Aye was also ready to trade the rights of the south-south DA mobilised masses, taking their rightful place during the 1998 DA convention, for rapprochement with the party autocrats!

We need to understand what “organic unity” means to grasp what lack of it is in general and particularly so in the context of the Pending Motel Convention. It exists mainly as a concept in literature, from the times of Plato and then Aristotle. Of course, it could be borrowed for political analysis. But it would have to maintain the essence of its original meaning, which is “the idea that a thing is made up of interdependent parts.”

It should be obvious to anybody, even from the analyses of both G.Frankie and J.Gaskie, that what was at stake for those “autocrats” was not so much having or lacking “organic link” with the mass of the Convention’s electorate. It was rather the fact that the Mayist platform had a mass support base in the state chapters it controlled. With this base and without a consensus between the two contending currents, the bureaucracy would lose on any issue that was put to vote, if the Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa delegates were recognised. These would include both programme and party leadership. Invocation of “organic unity” is thus nothing but an attempt at mystification of the real political issues at stake in August 1998.

Now to the shameless lie of my supposed readiness to trade the rights of the “mobilised mass” on the basis of my lack of an organic link with them as well. Since I was there as a leading member of the M31M, which mobilised this mass, how could it be said that I lacked an organic link with them? According to G.Frankie, it was not just this phantom lack of an organic link that was a problem. I was also ready to trade the rights of our mass base to being delegates “for rapprochement with the party autocrats!”

But what he fails to point out is that I more than any other Mayist, and the Lagos branch of our tendency more than any other branch had issues with these same autocrats that would have precluded our wanting any rapprochement with them under even less contentious circumstances. In fact, I and the Lagos branch of the M31M as a whole had pulled out of DA three years earlier, and came to the Convention only to support the work our comrades in Port Harcourt had been able to do in the party.

Why did we break from DA in Lagos? I was elected Assistant Secretary, Youths, Welfare and Culture of the Lagos State Chapter of DA shortly after the 4^th June Founding of the party. The Lagos state branch of M31M was very active in the DA for a year after that. But I resigned and the M31M in Lagos pulled out of the party in August 1995. This was due to the role of the DA bureaucracy in the splintering of NANS the month before. There was no basis for continued work with comrades we could not trust.

This was discussed at a national meeting of the tendency which we hosted at Unilag in the first week of September that same year, where G.Frankie was present. Considering the work our comrades at PH were doing with the party, it was resolved that they continue under the DA platform which was also an anchor for the Rivers State CSOs Coalition.

By the way, while J.Gaskie and G.Frankie would report to national meetings as if we had a collective body in PH, there was never a branch of the movement there – a fact that G.Frank only pointed out in 2010 during the process of our merger with the old SL which J.Gaskie tried to truncate.

So, in the absence of the information technology we have today and with national meetings becoming less frenquent, the two of them always acted simply as individuals without any concrete sense of organisational discipline. Probably this might have contributed to his (sub-conscious?) presentation of “organic unity” of parts as being between individuals as components of the relations with the mobilised mass?

Well, whatever could be his reason or less than honourable motive for this falsification, there was no basis in fact or logic for me to have sought rapprochement with the party bureaucracy. I had a difference of opinion with all but one of the other seven members of our tendency at the meeting on the two key issues at stake. I am still convinced today of the correctness of my stance and the only ones who have recanted their position rather than own up to it are those who now accuse us of recanting! But despite my perspective, once there was a tendential position on the issues at stake, I did not only stand by the collective decision. I also armed the tendency with ideas including for the name of what emerged and description of what the Convention could be considered as.

G.Frankie, who joined the tendency some five years after we founded it was someone I did hold in high esteem for years. But ever since his last-minute roundabout turn on the merger process of the old SWM and the old SL in 2011, the warm relations we had was replaced with hostility, though I did try to keep in touch for some time. His baseless lies on our roles in 1998 might thus be unfortunate, but it comes as no surprise.

The curious matter of slating

Probably the most curious of the issues in contention at the Convention was that of leadership slating. Those of us from Lagos arrived to meet a fait accompli; J.Gaskie was to run for president of DA. There had been no preceding discussion within the organisation nationally. And since, as one got to realise latter, there was no PH branch, there couldn’t have been discussion on the matter as a tendency even at the state level. But we uncritically accepted this self-serving bid.

As J.Gaskie informs though, “we were open to and proposed that we negotiate and reach agreement on these two issues (i.e. on the transition and the leadership slating) and present a joint and harmonised political program and electoral slate to the convention for ratification” (parentheses mine, BA).

He further points out that the negotiation arrived at “a consensus and harmonised political program to engage with the transition program” (italics mine, BA). Contrary to the view that J.Gaskie presented that “the stumbling block upon which the convention eventually faltered” was that the aristocrats “were in no mood to concede any significant position in the national executive to our side”, they accepted a slate which would include J.Gaskie as General Secretary. But they rejected our proposition for Chima Ubani from their side to serve as president. They wanted Dr Abayomi Ferreira (the party president) on the slate, for his second term (whilst Chima Ubani was to serve as Deputy President).

Our comrades insisted that there was no way we were going to accept Dr Ferreira as president. The other side, they vehemently said, had to present Chima Ubani as the candidate for president for us to reach an agreement. Till date, I still cannot understand that extent of a sense of self-entitlement i.e., to insist on determining who the other side was to present for what (with the benefit of hindsight, it probably reflected what was happening in our non-existent PH branch, where personages and not structures were the organisation).

Indeed, every rule has its exceptions which reinforce the rule. If a group were presenting someone with a background which runs contrary to what the party itself stood for (e.g., someone with fascist inclinations, but then such persons should not be welcomed in such a party like DA in the first place), taking the stand we took could have been understandable. Dr Ferreira (like virtually every one of us) is definitely not perfect. But since his student days when he played a leading role in the anti-Anglo-Nigeria defence pact struggle of 1961 till that period (and I daresay till date for the octogenarian), he has been a principled and consistent socialist.

An interesting point of note beyond this rather curious bit that we did not reach an agreement on is what we were ready to reach an agreement on. If the other side had been ready to present Chima as presidential candidate, we would have dropped all the hullabaloo of “no to the Abubakar transition”! The SNC as an immediate alternative transition in opposition to the military government’s transition programme was thus tradeable, for a seat at the table, once it was with persons from the other side that we felt more comfortable with. This, I daresay is not exactly the most principled of positions a revolutionary organisation could have taken.

On drawing lessons

There were questions and issues raised in Gaskie’s articles which appear as attempts to draw lessons from 1998 and flowing from these, make assertions about today (i.e., 2018, but of course still – or even more – relevant in 2020/2021). The key points on this two-track road could be said to be:

·         in 1998 and today there were/are individuals, who whilst all professing to being left, refuse to work together, and this marks a collective undoing of revolutionary left influence in national politics

·         “with particular respect to the Take Back Nigeria Movement initiative for political intervention to engage with the political process, there are those who saw 2018 as a payback time for the perceived infractions of 1998 and hence would neither lift a finger to facilitate the process nor even speak; favourably about the process” while some others wee “quick to jump to the political trains of so-called left candidates and parties” (italics mine, BA)

·         the “life transforming” events of the January 2012 general strike and mass protests radicalised a generation. But “we” have failed to take ownership of the legacy of this moment, thus ceding leadership of the mass movement to people who have “no political clarity” and “lack ideological understanding of reality” and who are “shaping the protest movement…of this period into a tokenist, reformist and autonomist movement” which is “content to seek cosmetic changes, and gratified to win tokenist concessions from the ruling class”  

In my view, these conflate both a genuine concern (i.e., the real need for closer and sincere need for collaboration on the left) and a self-ascription of the true left. Sectarianism has truly been an Achilles’ heel of the revolutionary left and should be combatted in all forms. But accusations of sectarianism should be closely looked at always, as sectarians are often quite quick to describe others with that very word.

With the background of drawing lessons from 1998 and particularly so the DA Convention of 22-23 August, whilst the DA bureaucracy was definitely not faultless, I am of the view that, we as M31M played sectarian and ultra-left politics. I don’t think that anyone could truly say that the bureaucracy which conceded to a joint leadership slate was anymore sectarian, and that is saying the least, than our group which insisted on who must serve as president from the bureaucracy’s side as a condition for collaboration on a joint leadership.

Fast forward to 2018 or more generally the period leading to the 2019 general elections. I don’t know about those deemed to have seen 2018 as payback time for 1998. But it is clear from earlier threads of discussion that, we – as the Socialist Workers and Youth League – were those, or at least part of those, being chastised, so to speak, for jumping onto the campaigns of other “so-called” left candidates and parties.

But what J.Gaskie obviously does is to put the cart before the horse. Before raising the question of support for or no support for the TBN candidacy, there are issues that had to be addressed, if this was to be a sincere case of drawing lessons for left politics.

First, how did the TBN and its candidacy emerge? Did this involve any discussion by what became TBN with other left groups or not? To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no. We were only contacted sometime in 2018 that J.Gaskie would be running for president and called to support his campaign. The idea that there should then have been automatic support for this candidacy or facilitation of its process, not to talk of our being condemned for making other choices of which party or candidate to support was yet again, and in the most brazen manner, an expression of self-entitlement as that done in 1998 in thinking that we had a right to determine who the DA “aristocrats” could or could not present to run for the party’s presidency towards a collective leadership.

Apart from this important point, there is also the question of what did the TBN campaign do to make it a feasible alternative for the Left? The decision to run for president of the federation was solely reached by J.Gaskie, as far as we know in 2013 if not earlier. In the wake of the January Uprising, he formed a short-lived Democratic Party for Socialist Reconstruction (DPSR) in 2012. And the following year, TBNM was formed with the announcement that he would be running for president as an independent candidate.

No effort was made to fight for the constitutional reform that would ensure room for an independent candidate. And then, independent candidate or not, over the five-year period from 2013 to 2018 there were no concrete efforts to build the initiative into a credible force. By the time the race for the 2019 elections started, it was left running around for a platform on which to run and without any wind whatsoever behind its rather still unfurled sails. Even something as basic as formal declaration to run (which was slated for 5^th May 2018 as posted on the TBN website) never took place.

There was no symposium, public meeting etc, not to talk of rally, in the name of the initiative. Why should such “effort” have been considered as a credible one for anyone or group to support - payback or no payback? The Yoruba have a saying to the effect that it is the child whose arms are opened that the mother can lift up. The first finger to be lifted is not that of those to support an initiative. It is rather the finger of those pushing such initiative. To think otherwise is demonstration of the height of a bizarre sense of entitlement.

Closely related to this sense of entitlement is an othering of non-aligned forces on the left as being at best “so-called left”, who clearly in his view have “no political clarity” and “lack ideological understanding of reality”. These two reinforcing elements of the approach of J.Gaskie came to the fore in his take (actively supported by some of his acolytes like Nathaniel Oluyemi Omo) on the SWL’s support for the African Action Congress in the last general elections.

We were called out and criticized for our organization’s decision “to back AAC, rather than any other left and or socialist oriented parties” (at the time J.Gaskie was hoping to walk away with the ticket of Socialist Party of Nigeria – he eventually went over to a lacklustre petty bourgeois party for sustainable development which still did not play ball).

Bu when AAC and the Coalition for Revolution (CORE) which it had built with the SWL and a number of other radical and revolutionary groups launched the RevolutionNow campaign in August 2019, rather than commend this demonstration of a politics which reached beyond that which is merely “tokenist, reformist and autonomist”, Gaskie’ dismissed the campaign as a mere “cacophony”.

What can a discerning activist draw from the foregoing? For Gaskie thus far at least (and he is not alone in this on the left, for sure), all the hue and cry of “let us work together as the left to avoid our collective undoing” actually translates into “come and work with and under our self-renowned enlightened guidance, irrespective of how underprepared we are for such leadership”. This is an approach that should be jettisoned on the left, for there to be genuine collaboration.

There appears to be a “learning from our history” in this regards, with J.Gaskie and the neo-SL at the driving seat of an ASCAB political intervention project. There are however questions left unanswered with this otherwise commendable effort, warts and all. For example, Gaskie/TBN have already declared his presidential ambition for 2023. Could the neo-SL/ASCAB project be more of an attempt to rally around (sections of) the left for this as the real project behind this seemingly inter-tendential project? If that were so, that would be simply a more sophisticated form of the coded “let’s work together” paradigm, confirming the old saying that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Time alone will tell.

Conclusion

My primary aim with this article was to set the records straight on events at the 22 – 23 August 1998 DA Convention, in the light of falsifications of these and which my name was dragged into, by G.Frankie (and less explicitly, J.Gaskie). This entailed reference to the sole edition of the People’s Democracy (November/December 1998), which as a primary source document puts the lie to some of the claims of the duo. I equally had discussions with a number of people who were present at the Convention to refute or confirm (as they largely did) those things which I could only recall from memory.

A secondary aim could not but be engagement with lessons for today. This is not simply because Gaskie in particular did, in a self-serving manner, make proposals along such lines. It is also because history cannot simply be decorative or interpretative for revolutionaries. As we learn from Marx’s in the 11^th  of his Thesis on Feuerbach “philosophers have interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.”  

In summing up, I will draw from a comrade’s commentary on a WhatsApp group discussion yesterday; “the scholarly vocation is nourished by fidelity to facts and truth.” The same goes for revolutionary interpretation of history. Historical falsification does not only represent malnourishment of ideas for struggle today. It is political, but not the kind of politics that should be allowed to flourish. Countering such politics must thus be an important part of a revolutionary’s intellectual vocation.

 

16^th December 2020