Norman Rush - Mating

I hope you believe me on this, if on nothing else. Note that I am not saying that making cooperative economic institutions work is impossible because we have to rely on our friend homo economicus to sustain them. Well. I am just saying you can do it, but you have to be wise as serpents.… But now number four.

Four. Whatever idea you might have — one might have — about giving Botswana a socialist industrial economy, remember that it, and all of Africa, is an agricultural economy. Show me a socialist country and I will show you a net food importer. Even now you, we, are living on gift food from the West. I notice that Boso is talking about collective farms and ranches. But believe me that the application of socialism — that is, making farmwork into wage labor — has been everywhere a disaster. Industrial socialism is one thing. Socialism in agriculture — the special case of the kibbutz excepted — is nonworkable. The last of the many group ranches set up in Kenya at independence closed down last year. If you choose only one single proposition that I have made tonight to study up and refute, choose that one.

One reason you’ll have to import food and pay cash for it is that as a socialist country you’ll only get gift food if your people sink to the point of starvation as they have in Mozambique.

Five was a mess. He couldn’t get it schematic enough, and during it some people got bored to the hilt. My notes, which I made when I went home that night, say that there are two ways to extract the social surplus — confiscatory via the state, or individual and voluntary, whereby people sweat and compel themselves to save. I think the point was that the rate of capital accumulation was much lower in systems where you have to rely on only the first method and that this will express itself in the need to rent capital in perpetuity from the more fecund market economies.

There was something related about the adaptive slowness of socialist systems in general, with efficient units subsidizing inefficient ones to an unconscionable degree. Exit and entry of firms was not controlled by efficiency, and since people would have political entitlements to jobs, the inefficient units would accumulate and encumber the economy. In this phase I was listening to the voice more than the man.

I caught Grace looking at me. I must have been being somewhat rapt. I think I caught a gleam of triumph in her eye before she looked away.

His wrap-up was good and was to the effect that in a nutshell orthodox socialism, which one was welcome to choose, was a system that was slower, more rigid, and more fragile because decisionmaking was centralized and there couldn’t be any risk-spreading, and had extraordinary recurrent costs not characteristic of the economies of its socalled rivals. And it was a system that would in all probability be permanently dependent on its socalled rivals. And even though the distribution of benefits withinsocialism was more equal — its sovereign virtue — there was a long-run tendency to inequality that could be argued about. And there was what he had said about the incompatibility of socialism and agriculture to remember.

There was a mixture of for and against outcries. Somebody from the Russian embassy was suddenly present and I gather was expected to say something — but he was shrugging. He had been out of the room, unfortunately. Mbaake was all set. In fact he was making the up and down waving motion Batswana use when they hitchhike instead of putting their thumb out, which conveyed sarcasm.

DENOON:

I just want to say—

More cries, including “Ow!” and the word “Menshevik.”

DENOON:

Comrades, I just want to say—

If I search my mind for permanent marks I left on Denoon rather than vice versa, this is one I can be sure of: I made him stop overusing the intro “I just this” or “I just that.” I convinced him that it was always taken as preapologetic. I warned him especially about beginning phone conversations that way. He got the point and after a couple of false starts completely stopped.

MBAAKE:

Now please hold on, my comrade said sardonically, for you are just catering for confusion. For you first cry down capitalism as making slaves and next time you say we must turn from scientific socialism lest we pay five great surcharges. So then we must just set to idling and look at our hands whilst all about us white guys are undertaking everything. It is just that Karl Marx was only very late to find out about all what we have been stopped from doing since many years by whitemen. And once we begin again with socialism you forgot to say how whitemen always kill us, as with Asegyefo Nkrumah.

So now you must tell us what is this suigenerism where we must turn and what is said very bitingly vernacular development.

DENOON:

But again I repeat I have not used the phrase you just used, for twelve years.

And I just want to say I am straying from my brief, which is just to talk about villages, can we somehow right away devise a few things we can do to save the village.

And what I have been doing up to this point is to say, One, capitalism is killing the village everywhere, bleeding it, killing it, throttling it, stealing its young men. So I hope I established that, because I think I saw my comrades very much agreeing at that point.

So then, Two, is socialism the way you save the village? Which I was prepared to hear said and to which I wanted to say no in advance to save time.

So tonight I am not talking about general systems except as answering objections in advance. So, One, the first question is, What is destroying the village? Answer: capitalism. Two, What can save the village? Answer: wait for socialism. The first answer is true and the second is false. Now about villages—

A VOICE:

So then we are just deceived if we see revolution upraising before our eyes.

DENOON:

Ah, revolution.

Nothing is more interesting than revolution, or should I say insurrection, because all the imagery of revolution comes from insurrection, which is a different thing.

I’m getting so far outside my brief it makes me nervous.

I should just say that even if you think socialism is the way, a way, to save the village, then revolution is the worst way to bring in socialism — positively, hands down, the worst.

This is what I meant when I said, also long ago, Socialism is the continuation of the romantic movement by any means necessary. This was a parody both on Clausewitz and on some people, socialists, who no longer exist, called the Black Panther Party. Revolution equals insurrection and insurrection is the icon at the heart of socialism.

You can see why! Socialists, especially young socialists, love the idea of revolution. Every circle of sociology majors and bookstore clerks wants to call itself the Revolutionary Party of the Left or the Party of the Revolutionary Left or the Left Revolutionary Party of the People — anything so long as revolution is in the title. We can understand this. Everything we want in a society is what we find brought out in people in the moment of insurrection. Spontaneity! Spontaneous hierarchy! Self-sacrifice! Staying awake all night! Working until we drop! Audacity! Camaraderie! The carnival behind the barricades — what it feels like when the police have just been kicked out of your quartier! Free eggs, free goods … until the stores that have been sacked lie empty. One man one gun! And don’t forget what it feels like to throw open the gates of the prisons! What a great moment! This is the moment the true socialist worships and thinks will be incarnated in the society on the morning after.

This is intellectual loneliness showing, I thought. It was evident he had a kind of hysteria to talk that was getting worse the more he was interrupted. He was veering all over. Who was Clausewitz to Mbaake? Denoon was supposed to be aiming himself at youth and he was talking about Clausewitz! The man was too lonely. I had no idea who he had with him out in the bush, but this scene suggested that they left something to be desired as discussants. The same sort of hysteria was familiar to me. I had experienced the same thing coming in from the Tswapong Hills to Keteng. I could be useful to this man. I love to talk, needless to say. Also I was pleased at how much of his rap I was getting, even if it was slightly outside my academic bailiwick. I love to talk. For a woman, I’m even considered a raconteuse. I remember jokes, for example. But then I also remember everything.