Can the Workers and Peasants rule themselves?

There is that common cliché as if the working people would be incapable to rule and administrate themselves without the ruling exploiting class and pro-capitalist “experts”. It is true that the capitalists, feudalists and their “expert” servants know how to run a state according to their interests. But does that really mean that the workers and peasants would not be able to get organized to rule themselves?

Lenin replied to such claims over a century ago: We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration.”1 This is obvious. When you put uneducated people into high positions, you get a dysfunctional administration like the Idi Amin regime, where his illiterate Sudanese generals could not even read military maps during the Ugandan-Tanzanian War. People need a certain amount of training, but the best training is of course practice.

Lenin also said: “”They” think that the “common people”, the “common” workers and poor peasants, will be unable to cope with the great, truly heroic, in the world-historic sense of the word, organisational tasks which the socialist revolution has imposed upon the working people. The intellectuals who are accustomed to serving the capitalists and the capitalist state say in order to console themselves: “You cannot do without us.” But their insolent assumption has no truth in it; educated men are already making their appearance on the side of the people, on the side of the working people, and are helping to break the resistance of the servants of capital. There are a great many talented organisers among the peasants and the working class, and they are only just beginning to become aware of themselves, to awaken, to stretch out towards great, vital, creative work, to tackle with their own forces the task of building socialist society.”2 Even when intellectuals are needed, there are some on the side of the working people that can educate them what they lack. It is also nothing unusual that a communist party is founded in the beginning by a circle of intellectuals as a nucleus. But a nucleus is like the head of a body – without its rump and limbs it is unable to survive.

Running a cooperative or running a political party are such pretty clear examples of training grounds for running the economy in a socialist way and in a communist party to learn to build up a functioning political apparatus, though in small. Learning from the small to achieve the big. As Stalin said: “Never refuse to do the little things, for from little things are built the big things.”3 Without starting to learn from small experiences we would be unable to achieve the big goal.

It is true, especially in African countries, to be on watch for corruption. But the same thing can be applied to the existing capitalist countries. The more there is control by the basis, the less corruption can come up. Corruption is a form of abuse of power and the commodification of public services on a black market. When the working people are able to overwatch the administration and also politicians more directly, those cannot become so estranged from the basis without a rising wish of recalling them from their positions. I elaborated that question already in another article in detail4.

It is necessary that a socialist Uganda is seen as one solidaric united national collective that envelops all ethnic groups. How could the Ugandan working people rule themselves when they exclude certain ethnic groups from democratic participation? Obote said that Ugandans shall not only know their own district and regard problems in other districts of Uganda as their own ones5. In national states in Europe, Asia and the Americas this is common knowledge. They mostly stand together. In Africa this is too often not the case. Nyerere said on a state visit in Uganda in 1988 that clans cannot compete with empires6. Overcoming the ethnic boundaries and shaping a common identity of the Ugandan working people will be the biggest task in ruling. The capitalist can rely on the principle “divide and rule” because they are in a minority. We cannot do that. And overcoming the distortions it caused among the people will take time. But we will achieve it.

The Ugandan people will take their destiny into their own hands!

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