AIDS, Obama and Zimbabwe

Dialectical and Historical Materialism forms the philosophical construct whereby Internationalists understand the World. It forms the basis for revolutionary action and activity. It shaped Lenin’s political approach to organizing, which revolutionized socialist movements. Mao Zedong contributed a great deal of theory because of it. Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Walter Rodney became giants in the African liberation struggle because they took hold of this Marxian methodology.

Dialectics studies contradictions. Dialectics is the study of motion and activity. Dialectics observes the harmony of opposites. Dialectics is the study of change. It is all these things and more. When we learn Dialectics, it must be understood and applied beyond the classroom.

To take an example, it is no coincidence that the AIDS epidemic began towards the end of the colonial period in Africa. The black community knows and recognizes this. Perhaps not so amazing, no scientist has as yet traced its etiology. Science knows, e.g., that gonorrhea originated in Greece about one thousand BC, from men having intercourse with sheep. Scientists kno this from breaking down the genetic profile of the gonorrhea cell. If science can identify and break down a mere molecule like DNA, it can identify any virus which contains DNA.

But society has not been informed about the origin of the HIV strain that leads to AIDS. Almost anyone may correctly surmise that HIV did not enter Africa until colonialism neared its end, which drives the assumption that HIV was invented in a laboratory. HIV/AIDS was first noticed in Haiti and in the San Francisco gay community. Were it not for the infection rate within the gay community, AIDS may still go untreated today. Africa people’s dialectical approach has slowed the spread of HIV in Africa, despite limited access to pharmaceuticals. We continue to do battle with AIDS despite Imperialism.

But everything studying change and motion and contradiction is not dialectics.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s series of speeches which separated him from Barack Obama constituted part of our historical struggle against Imperialism. Wright obviously values his relationship to the African masses more than that to a potential US president. Which is every noble. Just taking that struggle on its face, a very shallow assumption, indeed, the African community may very well prefer Wright to Obama in every sense, and for reasons beyond the scope of this essay. Obama’s genuflect response to white critics’ finger-pointing is one.

On the question of Africa, we can surmise that whatever Obama hopes today to accomplish will tomorrow be derailed by his instantaneous kowtowing to racism. Our enemies also study change, motion, harmony and contradictions. However, this for propelling society backwards, which explains why we consider them reactionaries. And Obama aspires to the reactionary crown, the US presidency. What little good may be accomplished by any man who is not a revolutionary, can quickly be wiped out in the next administration.

Zimbabwe poses a question in context. In the past, Africans have held ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe is high esteem. Zimbabwe played the major role in settling the security question for Southern Africa. While Angola -- leading a combined force made of Cubans, and fighting cadres from South Africa and Namibia -- may be said to have delivered Imperialist apartheid's death blow in Cuito Cuanavales, Zimbabwe had been dug in for the long-term. The shimmering prestige of the Harare regime glowed all over the African world.

Today that prestige is crushed. The Imperialists have wanted to open Zimbabwe’s veins since the negotiated settlement. Now the attacks on Zimbabwe have begun to rain in from what poses as the black Left. Forming an ideological thunderhead over our comrades there, they have let loose with a torrent of criticism that does not characterize the revolutionary tradition. It is reminiscent of the critics of the Baathists in the months following the US invasion of Iraq. In fact, some critics of ZANU have gone so far as to put Mugabe in the leaky same boat as Saddam Hussein.

As well he may be, but for different reasons. Horace Campbell excoriated Saddam in a 2003 Black Commentator article condemning Mugabe. Campbell did so without elaborating on the role Saddam had played for Imperialism, and how Imperialism betrayed him. Discussing Saddam’s scourge on the Kurds, not his eight-year war against Iran, Panama’s Noriega may have been my example. But they’re both good examples for reasons Campbell missed. They both got invaded by America, justified by criticisms made by ideological forces supposedly loyal to the masses, like Campbell, and professor Mike Matambanadzo.

That is empiricism and revision, not dialectics.