Several times in 2023, working-class people and youths poured out to the streets to protest economic hardship and demand end bad governance. Many had the idea that our key issues of concern are bad governance, corruption, and government’s lack of respect for the so-called rule of law. With this goes the belief that repression and the economic problems that poor working people are faced with today will become a thing of the past, once the government pursues a liberal economy and approach to governance properly. A post on X (former Twitter) states the problem of Nigeria, in their opinion, is that of “capitalism not done right”.
The solution proposed based on this ideological position is “capitalism that works”, as they claim it does in advanced capitalist economies in the West, based on liberal democracy. But history shows that this road only leads to a cliff edge of disillusionment.
Liberal ideas arose to justify the exploitative economy of the capitalist system. And liberal democracy as a form of government was to supplant the power of the kings and nobles in feudal Europe. Every single gain made by working-people in expanding liberal democracy such as making the right to vote a universal right was through struggle. Liberalism does not create wealth and happiness for all. It was not designed to do so. It is a cover for bourgeois authoritarianism in the economy and increasingly so in the polity as well.
Liberalism, which is the basis for liberal democracy and capitalism, is a philosophy created during what is called the “Age of Enlightenment” in Europe. It was based on rejecting the ideas of the divine rights of kings in favour of espousing the “rights of man”, a constitutional government, free market capitalism as a radical idea to take away the means of production from the landed aristocrats and free economic power to be assessed by everyone. Philosophers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume espoused the liberal philosophy at its cradle. Economists like Adam Smith put forward theories based on it. And politicians like George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson implemented policies based on these.
Its ideals of freedom seem nice on face value, but then digging deeper you begin to discover that for early liberal theory and many of its theorists not all humans can be classified as “people”. For them, being a person was synonymous with being a white male European.
It was this notion that made them proclaim that “All men are created equal” and declare “The Rights of Man” while owning a lot of slaves. It was using this idea that John Locke while believing in freedom endorsed the genocide of the Native Americans and the trans-Atlantic slave trade as they were in his eyes savages and did not have the right to the land which white people seized from them.
It was in this spirit that Hegel proclaimed that Africa had no history, no philosophy and its people were to be likened to small children. The ideals of liberalism that the white man was the highest form of humankind were used to justify slavery and colonialism as civilization projects of “savages”. It is in this spirit that the West wages wars, overthrows governments and meddles in elections with the goal, as they claim, being freedom, democracy and the spreading of the ever so great western values.
Liberalism and liberal governments always claim to go around spreading civilization, democracy, freedom and so-called Western values but it is really to enslave, colonise and extract from all non-White people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to enrich the ruling class of those countries.
This will be difficult without the spreading of despotism and the enabling and supporting of authoritarian leaders in Africa and all over the non-Western world. Meanwhile, while they support authoritarian governments to push through neoliberal policies in pauperised countries like Nigeria, they are quick to call out governments opposed to their policies for being authoritarian.
A few Examples of this in Africa since the end of formal colonialism include: The overthrow of Lumumba and the support of Mobutu in the Congo, the support and endorsement of the overthrow of Nkrumah in Ghana, opposition to the independence movements in Angola and Zimbabwe, support of apartheid South Africa, the current support for the governments of Cameroon, Rwanda and Uganda which are well known for corruption, suppressing dissent and punishing of opposition voices.
Even the current Tinubu government has been endorsed by various liberal governments with a lot of them congratulating him on winning an election which was filled with electoral violence and electoral malpractice which various international elections observers mostly from liberal societies noted and reported on. For liberal governments it is not about freedom and democracy it is about submission to exploitation, if need be through violence, for the benefit of global capitalism.
This is not something we should aspire to but something we should reject. The economic side of liberalism which preaches that free market capitalism is the source of lifting people out of poverty, creating wealth for everyone and has to be the basis of democracy is nothing more than a myth.
The truth is that capitalism is a means of exploitation of the many for the profit of the few. It has also been the cause for the destruction of the environment and climate change and in its highest form imperialism it is the cause of the underdevelopment of Africa and the exploitation and extraction of its resources to develop and grow advanced capitalist economies in the Euro-American centres of Western imperialism.
This has created a world where corporations, mainly Western corporations, make key decisions based on their interests, with their governments enforcing and managing them in international relations.
One of the ways in which this imperialist exploitation is done is through Structural Adjustment Programs in which corrupt governments friendly to the liberal order get loans or “aid” from international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (which were created by liberal governments at the end of the second World War and has represented their collective financial interests ever since).
And in return, they open up their countries to brutal capitalist exploitation and extraction where the fruits of this enterprise barely helps working-class people and mostly makes things worse through things like environmental destruction among others.
Also part of these programs is the cutting of public services like education and healthcare and a purposeful devaluing of the local currency to boost profit margins for the western companies carrying the exploitation. The fact is that liberalism and liberal governments have not been a force of good and freedom for most peoples in the world. Rather they have been one of evil and oppression.
In Secondary School I was taught that there were 5 pillars of democracy namely; the rule of law, separation of powers, free and fair elections, independence of the judiciary and the free press. So from that logic can a class based liberal society really have free and fair elections when the electoral system (as is the case with liberal societies) is dominated by money and large campaign donations?
What is the point of “rule of law” for the poor masses if that law is made by and for the ruling class? Are powers really separated if they all come from one class, members of whom largely grew up in similar backgrounds and went to the same schools – the ones where working-class people could not afford?
Can the judiciary really be independent if apart from coming from the ruling classes, the other branches of government choose them? And finally can the press really be free if the same class that dominates the government already controls them?
The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis captured the reality of Western liberalism at the heart of global capitalism, when he said “the West isn’t a democracy, it’s an oligarchy”.
by Emmanuel IRO-OKORO
