It is hard to exaggerate the genius of Issa Shivji’s 1975 book, Class Struggles in Tanzania, as well as the frustration that it has been out of print for decades and is now relatively forgotten. There are many aspects of the book which deserve revisiting, each could comprise a separate review; this one will focus on Shivji’s forensic exposé of Tanzania’s socialism in the 1960s and 1970s and his detailed account of class, and class struggle in the country since independence.
Shivji is a Tanzanian radical socialist, writer, poet and academic, trained lawyer and Marxist. His influence on Tanzanian and African radical politics has been vast – he has helped to ensure the continuity of Marxist ideas on the continent and challenged the devastation caused by the IMF and World Bank and never-ending pillage by Western governments.[1]
He was also, arguably, the first and most-thorough critic on the left of both Tanzania’s first leader, Julius Nyerere, and post-independence Tanzania’s pretence of socialism. In his fulsome critique of the ruling party, and its ostensible adherence to socialist principles, Shivji was a pioneer.
Tanzania had gained independence from the UK in 1961 and was led by the impressive and charismatic Julius Nyerere. Educated in Makerere College in Uganda and then Edinburgh University, Nyerere developed a socialist programme for Tanzania, and through the 1960s insisted on systematic reforms to reverse the country’s underdevelopment.[2] In 1967 the ruling party published the Arusha Declaration, and declared a commitment to urban and agrarian reform, which explicitly opposed capitalism. From 1967 to 1973, Tanzania’s red years, socialist hope was on the streets – students, workers and overseas volunteers were vociferous in lending their critical support and, in some cases, volunteering physically in the grassroots projects of rural development.
These endeavours appeared sincere, and the country became a magnet not only for liberation organisations from those parts of the continent still under colonial occupation – Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and their respective liberation organisations, Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front), MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), ANC (African National Congress), SACP (South African Communist Party), ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) – but also to individual militants, Marxists and socialists from around the world, including Walter Rodney, John Saul, Lionel Cliffe, Janet Bujra and hundreds of others.
These socialists came to Tanzania – the continental mecca of socialism – to throw their weight behind what appeared to be a brave project of socialist change. Foreign activists worked in the university in the capital Dar es Salaam, in rural villages undergoing collectivization, or provided expertise for government departments. These were heady times, and you would have had to be dull and blind-to-the-world to have been unstirred by events in Tanzania.
Yet, at the heart of what was essentially a state-led, bureaucratic project, were gapping contradictions, and worse, repression. The ruling party, TANU’s socialism was hollow – the Emperor’s New Clothes, of the popular fairytale, with few prepared to call out the reality of a hollow, class-riven country, which was being run by a bureaucratic elite. But there was an important outlier – Issa Shivji.[3]
A student of Walter Rodney’s, though in many ways also Rodney’s teacher, and a Marxist of great sophistication, Shivji pushed hard against the limits of the government in the late 1960s and 1970s while a student and then a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam – writing, editing and organising at the university – he became deeply critical of the ostensibly socialist pronouncements of Nyerere and the ruling party, and embarked on an analytical and theoretical work on the reality of class in independent Tanzania. Crowning this work was the publication of Class Struggles in Tanzania in 1976.
Class Struggles is arguably the most significant and rigorous Marxist critique of Nyerere’s Tanzania. Even reading it today, when little of Nyerere’s left-wing and socialist past remains intact, the effect is startling. Nyerere’s projects, from the nationalization of firms to the collectivization of farms, are exposed by Shivji as “petty-bourgeois nationalist reforms” that failed to challenge the underlying legacy of capitalism and underdevelopment in Tanzania. However, Shivji was not alone, he was part of an organised collective of radical students and young lecturers that included the brilliant Marxist statistician Karim Hirji. Zeyad el Nabolsy has written powerfully how Hirji was both a confidant and comrade to Walter Rodney (and by no means Rodney’s disciple), and another early, forthright critic of Nyerere’s forced villagisation programme.
Yet, it was Shivji who provided the fullest exposé of Tanzania’s great socialist hope. He rebutted the idea of socialist change from above, which had seduced a generation. But his immense gift to the Marxist left in his 1975 book was to bring class struggle to the centre of socialist transformation; throughout, he quotes Lenin’s line: “outside the class struggle, socialism is either a hollow phrase or a naive dream.”
Essentially, the book describes the class nature of the project of transformation in Tanzania since independence. At the same time, however, the volume is a challenge to what was apparently a radical and fashionable thought across the continent at the time. In the preface, Shivji explains how the book came out of his The Silent Class Struggle, published in 1971: “I have tried to give an outline sketch of the class struggles in Tanzania since independence.” Though not pretending to write a definitive account, he explains, “My aim has been simply to indicate the course of these struggles and hope that further historical research will fill in the many gaps that no doubt exists in the present work.” [4] Predicting that the volume would upset those seeking “celebration” of Tanzania’s “experiment,” Shivji explains that his analysis is aimed not at celebration or criticism, but rather explanation.
Shivji then details Marx’s method and theory of class struggle, challenging, first of all, the “alleged non-existence” of classes and class struggle in Africa as argued in the work and practice of African socialism as conceptualised by Nyerere. He writes: “The propagation of the non-existence of classes and its theoretical rationalisation in the elite theories attempt to exclude by definition the Marxist theoretical tools and therefore the possibility of genuine revolutionary movements.” Among a group of African socialists, including Nyerere, the rejection of class struggle was a near-universal principle, or, as Shivji puts it, “The expounding of the revolutionary ideology as applied to concrete conditions in Africa is at once condemned as un-African.” [5] Whether in the writing of Leopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah (before 1966 – it is important to note that Nkrumah, unique in his generation of socialist leaders of Africa, entirely revised his position on class and the class struggle while in exile from Ghana after the American supported coup that deposed him in 1966), or Nyerere, Marxism was condemned as an alien ideology, imposed by the North, with little in common with African conditions.
Instead, Shivji develops a rigorous Marxist account of the country’s trajectory. Indeed, his entire book is a sustained and creative application of Marxism to Tanzania’s political economy—not as an aberrant or exceptional part of the world, but one tied into the whole fabric of global capitalism. Nor is the exercise an academic one; it is rooted in the practice and politics of the oppressed classes. On this, Shivji was categorical: “Potential revolutionaries must themselves fully appreciate the theoretical problems involved because they have immediate significance and relevance for guiding revolutionary practice.” In fact, Shivji is scathing about “metropolitan academic Marxists” who, quite unlike an earlier generation of Marxists, have not been involved in revolutionary practice.[6]
Chapter 2 discusses the applicability of Marxism to Africa—or the predicament thereof. Shivji debunks certain important myths. One of the central arguments at the time saw “Marxist socialism” as a peculiar development of the global North, with exclusive relevance to the developed economies. In Africa, as Shivji writes, “there is no highly developed capitalism and, therefore, according to Marxism, we would first have to develop capitalism.” However, this is impossible, he argues; therefore, the capitalist stage must be skipped: “[W]e must build socialism on the basis of African traditions—hence African Socialism.” [7] Shivji argues that Tanzania and all parts of the continent are intimately connected to global capitalism: “[W]hen we talk about Africa today . . . we are talking about the countries which have had long historical relations with advanced capitalist countries, and which now form part of the world capitalist system.” [8]
Shivji concludes:
[B]uilding of socialism is not skipping or jumping the capitalist stage for we are very much part of the capitalist relations… Neither is the option of developing vigorous national capitalisms open to many African countries for, among other things, it would require disengagement from the international capitalist system, a period of primitive capital accumulation (without the slave trade or the colonies!), a vigorous national bourgeoisie to do this and the docile masses to endure a long period of sacrifice.[9]
Against this impossibility, Shivji suggests another route, centered on the struggle of classes —“a social-political struggle against existing relations of production, which are responsible for throttling the development of productive forces.” [10] Given Tanzania and the continent’s underdevelopment this struggle is, he argues, was going to be tough and require careful attention to strategy and tactics. At the heart of this battle is “a struggle of classes”, and Shivji explains that the challenge to existing conditions is inevitably connected to the fight against existing “socio-economic organisation.” [11]
There is, Shivji is clear, no capitalist path. What there is of a national bourgeoisie in Africa is neither national nor bourgeois—where there was the development of such a class in the nineteenth century in Egypt or Madagascar, for example, it was snuffed out when it came into contact with advanced capitalism. Instead, a “petty bourgeois” elite, tied to metropolitan capitalism, does not have an independent economic base of its own. It was, Shivji argued, the leading role this class played in independence that had bestowed on it the function of ruling. Unlike many of his generation, Shivji does not abandon working-class agency, even if he makes certain important addendums to classical Marxism.
“In many African countries” he argues, “large groups of wage-earners employed in large capitalist industry . . . did not develop and could not have possibly developed in the conditions of the colonial . . . economies. Nevertheless, in all these countries a class of wage-earners did develop . . . employed mainly on plantations, in the docks, in transport and commerce, and in construction, building, etc.”
Despite evident “weaknesses” in the development of an African working class, they played a strategic role in the struggle for independence, conscious of their position and their economic importance, frequently launching strikes and initiatives without any support. The key, Shivji argues, to the development, or furtherment, of “this potential revolutionary strata” is that they are “mobilised under the leadership of the proletarian ideology.”[12]
These arguments may seem self-evident, or unremarkable; however, we must try to glimpse them in their context. Shivji was not writing a monograph that would see him through to his next academic promotion (in fact, a book that targeted Nyerere’s very political foundations would likely have had the opposite effect); rather an assertion of the revolutionary role of the working class in Africa was an act of considerable daring, placing this class and its struggles at the centre of Marxism was a far more radical undertaking—forcing a break with many narratives on the Left that were fashionable at the time. Marxism with class struggle at its heart, Shivji announced in 1975, was not a “foreign” or imposed theory, as certain proponents of African socialism had argued at the time.
Shivji proceeds to pull up the foundation stones of Tanzania’s socialist achievements. The aforementioned Arusha Declaration – a document issued in 1967 by the ruling party, which outlined its commitment to a Tanzanian path to socialism – he writes, marked the “end of one phase of struggle between the petty bourgeoise and the commercial bourgeois and the beginning of the second.” [13] The “commercial bourgeois,” made up almost exclusively of Tanzania’s Asian population had long monopolized the “import and export business”; therefore, with the nationalization of these sectors, the class was largely broken. The declaration was an important “staging post,” not in the dismantling of Tanzanian capitalism but in the development of the “bureaucratic bourgeoisie.” This “bureaucratic” class used the rhetoric of socialism, which, while largely hollow – there was, Shivji argued, no serious confrontation with Tanzania’s capitalist relations of production – did usher in a period of debate and discussion on the meaning of socialism and Marxism. Shivji’s own contributions were a direct expression of this period of debate and learning.
Prior to this period, the government had already effectively banned strikes, while moving the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (NUTA) in 1964 under government control. In an effort to secure social acquiescence, it had implemented certain reforms, including a minimum wage, security of employment legislation, and the National Provident Fund. While not insignificant, Shivji argued that these measures were ultimately unable to challenge the country’s underdevelopment; yet in exchange, the government wanted to see an increase in “productivity” in the name of “national development.” Reinforcing a widespread notion of privilege, a 1967 report entitled “Wages, Incomes and Prices Policy” – written for the International Labour Organization by Professor Herbert Turner, a UK based economist and statistician who worked as a consultant to newly independent states – argued that workers had secured their increase in wages at the direct expense of peasants. The government concurred, going so far as to say that the report dovetailed with the socialist principles of the Arusha Declaration. Shivji explains, “Sacrifices, rises in productivity, restraint in wage demands, etc., were asked of workers when the profits of the capitalists continued to increase.” This apparent contradiction—austerity for workers, profits for the bosses—was resolved by the state becoming a majority shareholder in private enterprises.[14] Now that the businesses they worked for were officially “theirs,” workers could be pressed even harder.
There was another element in the report that Shivji highlights: its arguments drove a wedge between the working class and the peasantry. The report posed the question: How could they possibly come together in united struggle if they were objective antagonists in the fight against capital? Shivji disagreed with this thesis, and he challenged much left-wing orthodoxy at the time — not least the writings of Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon had seen the urban working class as a privileged colonial class whose interests stood in direct opposition to both the lumpenproletariat in shantytowns and slums, and the “revolutionary peasantry.”
Both groups were exalted for their selfless revolutionary activity. In this respect, Shivji argues, Fanon had been wrong. The Arusha Declaration, therefore, was not a socialist project; instead, it saw the deepening involvement of the state in trade, milling, export and import, and in light industries, substantially dislodging the commercial bourgeoisie – creating not a bottom-up project of socialist transformation, but leading to a strengthening of what Shivji described as a bureaucratic bourgeoisie in the state. The resulting exodus of the Asian bourgeoise who had dominated the import and export business, Shivji noted, was almost universal, and “in a few cases, those without ready money took loans to get out of the country.” [15] To see these celebrated reforms subjected to such ruthless scrutiny, in a text written almost fifty years ago, is impressive, and surprising.
Along with the “bureaucratic bourgeoisie’s” growing confidence and dominance, Shivji notes, had come the development of a panoply of class benefits. Its high-income levels secured access to education and medical facilities, its urban base secured access to the best services. The class also had everything it needed for its own continued reproduction. Common social and income status meant that the class mixed, in the same bars, clubs, hotels, and neighbourhoods — even if this social reproduction was low by the standards of the European or North American bourgeoisie, in its “age-old exclusive social and cultural class-institutions.”[16]
Though Shivji argues that the Arusha Declaration did not launch a socialist transformation of the country, he concedes it did have one enduring legacy. For many years afterward, it raised a debate on socialism, and through the critique of its program and promises, it “put socialism on the agenda for the first time in a concrete way.” [17]
Moving on, Shivji examines the vaunted programs of villagization and Ujamaa, which were efforts to integrate non-monetarized (or subsistence) sectors into the cash economy. This meant, in his words, deeper “integration within the world capitalist system.” The task of a “real transformation” of agriculture, he writes, “is above everything else, [a] . . . political struggle—class struggle against the internal and external classes with vested interests in maintaining and perpetuating the existing relations of production.” [18]
Having revealed the limitations of the Tanzanian socialist experiment, Shivji turns his attention to the actual class struggle. Specifically, he writes of the “transformation of the people themselves through struggle.” [19] I have already written on Liberated Texts about the influence of Shivji’s text on Rodney. Rodney embraced with excitement Shivji’s analysis of class struggle, and the independent role of the working class in struggle as a possible revolutionary force to the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. The impact of Shivji’s book on Rodney’s own work, and the development of his ideas and Marxist was profound.
As we have seen, Shivji dismantles the notion of the “labour aristocracy”— which lifted the peasantry to the status of revolutionary class.[20] He argues that the working class and its political potential rest on its position in the process of production more than its numerical size. Though tiny compared to its European and North American counterpart, it plays, he argues, “an important role in the process of production but a very strategic one too. . . To be sure, even in the independence struggle the workers were in the forefront.” By contrast, Shivji remarks: “There has been no example in Africa where the peasants have played a leading revolutionary role while the workers have sided with the dominating classes. It is a complete confusion therefore to identify the whole working class … as a labour aristocracy.”
Shivji is relentless in his conclusions. “[T]he state,” he writes, “thus asserted its class character regardless of the ideology. But in so doing it laid bare the fundamental contradiction between the exploited and the exploiter.” [21] Shivji concludes that the vital exercise of converting class instinct into sustained class consciousness required “proletarian ideology.” The astonishing wave of strikes, occupations, and workers’ militancy marked the end of a period when workers could be used as “cannon fodder” in petty-bourgeois politics. Finishing the book, Shivji declares, optimistically: “This time it will be their own struggles—their own class war—and the struggle of their fellow exploited class, the poor peasants that they will fight, not to replace one exploiter with another but to begin to replace the very system of exploitation.” [22]
The book is a brilliant takedown of the entire socialist pretence of the Nyerere government, which had inspired those who lived and worked in Dar. Shivji’s book marks a milestone in the very best of Marxist analysis – theoretically rigorous, empirically thorough and refusing to accept any fashionable idols. For the continent, Shivji exposed a great lie, and pointed to the lost subject, the vital role of the African working class, and for this, and much more, we owe Shivji an enormous debt.[23]
The role of the working class in post-independence political change in Africa has been systematically excluded or ignored by even the greatest writers and activists since the 1960s, and frequently marginalised by a political strategy that excluded the agency of the working class. The great power of Shivji’s 1975 classic is his relentless focus on this lost subject in Tanzania. In the midst of the project for transformation and socialism in Tanzania, Shivji made good on this history and unpicked the politics and theories which had marginalised the agency of working people on the continent, and in Tanzania in particular. His book was not a hackish party volume repeating the “correct line”, but a recovery of real history based on thorough going empirical work informed by Marxism. Tragically, even in recent and broadly positive accounts of Marxism on the continent there is little or no reference to working class struggle.[24] Shivji’s book needs to be studied once more for his brilliant research and analysis, and his relentless focus on the centrality of the African working class.
Leo Zeilig is a writer and researcher. He has written extensively on African politics and history, and biographies on some of Africa’s most important political thinkers and revolutionaries. Leo is also a novelist, and his critically acclaimed novel Eddie the Kid was published by Zero Books.
[1] Issa Shivji, Let the People Speak: Tanzania down the road to neo-liberalism (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2006).
[2] Shivji has since co-authored a massive three volume biography of Nyerere, Development as Rebellion (Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2020).
[3] Indeed, Shivji draws the comparison to the classic fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, declaring fearlessly: “The emperor is not wearing anything at all!”
[4] Issa Shivji, “Preface,” Class Struggles in Tanzania (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976) pp. 3–4.
[5] Shivji, Class Struggles, pp. 3–4.
[6] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 4.
[7] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 14.
[8] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 18.
[9] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 17.
[10] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 17-18.
[11] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 18.
[12] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 22-23.
[13] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 76-77.
[14] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 78.
[15] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 82.
[16] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 96.
[17] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 98.
[18] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 107.
[19] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 97.
[20] “Labour aristocracy” means something very different to most Marxist readers in English, who will associate the term with Global North workers benefitting from the exploitation of the Global South and joining in imperialist alliances with “their own” governments. However, Shivji’s used the term to refer to how the working class has been incorrectly elavated to a “class apart”, benefiting from the post-colonial oppression of rural areas and the peasantry. I am grateful to Patrick Higgins for clarifying this point.
[21] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 145.
[22] Shivji, Class Struggles, p. 145.
[23] I am enormously grateful for a typically insightful conversation with Gavin Capps on the actual role yet glaring absence of the African working class in post-independence analysis, histography and theory.
[24] See the otherwise excellent recent volume, Kevin Okoth, Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (London: Verso Books, 2023).
