Chapter 4 adds another intellectual dimension and genealogy to Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophy by arguing that he was aware of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and that the Ghanaian economy existed and functioned within this state capitalist, mixed economic framework. Moreover, this chapter examines how people within and outside Ghana understood the duality of Ghana’s socialist and capitalist economy – its socialist state capitalist project – and its applicability to Ghana’s conditions and the postcolonial world. It demonstrates that the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, Socialist De-Colony merges the nonoverlapping intellectual and geographic spaces of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” and Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism” with Maxim Matusevich’s “Africa and the Iron Curtain.” It shows how the cultural and intellectual interchange of ideas between and amongst Black thinkers moved beyond the Atlantic circuit and were simultaneously heavily mediated and impacted by ideas from the East.

The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

Chapter 6 examines the lives, intellectual discourses, and working conditions of those who were supposed to build socialism in postindependent Africa. Workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions the state and its leftist supporters imagined. Despite the state and leftist intellectuals championing themselves as a worker’s party and embodying workers’ rights, laws were passed to handicap workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial, socialist African government that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands. The workers used ingenious techniques to resist and negotiate the power of the state and capital. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation was only possible in coordination and conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair. For workers, they believed that their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would prove them right. The chapter complements histories highlighting African workers’ centrality – through their letters and feet – in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states and socialism.

Chapter 5 focuses on the state system of food provision, which continues to supply Cuban families with essential food and other household goods in heavily subsidised prices. State goods operate as concretions of the revolution’s moral project, embodying its frugal ethos metonymically, and taking it deep into people’s homes and ultimately, through ingestion, their bodies. Here too, however, the duplex personhood elaborated earlier comes into play, this time due to the fact that people gain access to these goods only by virtue of their bureaucratic designation as ‘citizens’ of the revolution. While this appears to be a version of the role/person model developed in Chapter 3, it also turns the model on its head since here the role of citizen is associated with what is deemed as the deepest level of people’s existence, namely their ‘basic needs’ as biological organisms. This puts a paradox into the heart of the state rationing system, which can be parsed out morphologically as the constitutive mismatch between a state system that purports to cater to people as whole, flesh-and-blood people, but only actually meets a small part of the needs they feel they have. The chapter builds a model of this part/whole paradox with reference to the ethnography of the system’s operation at neighbourhood level.

Chapter 5 discusses the economic structure of a rational state. Anticipating Marx’s critique of capitalism, Hegel associates the maximization of self-interest promoted by the modern market to an inconsistent and ultimately irrational conception of freedom. He argues that the elevation of freedom to a rational form requires not merely a readjustment of the economic sphere, but a change of paradigm, and this change is entrusted to a system of professional corporations in which competition is replaced by cooperation and trust. Yet although these groups can help mitigate capitalism’s worst excesses, they are not up to the conceptual role Hegel wants them to play. This does not mean, however, that his associative strategy cannot be successfully revived. The chapter’s final section shows that a rational economic sphere implies not only the common ownership of society’s productive resources, but also the democratization of the productive sphere. Drawing on the market socialist tradition, it is suggested that the corporations can be fruitfully reconstructed as worker-directed enterprises, capable of recapturing their communal spirit while avoiding their main limitations.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

The dominant assumptions positing a linear relationship among individualism, capitalism, competition, and inequality are often rooted in the perspectives of social scientists, whose focus is frequently confined to the West in modern times. I argue that these dominant assumptions have been formulated without sufficient opportunities or willingness to consider societies with cultures and systems different from those of the West. In this regard, this book challenges these dominant assumptions by presenting compelling counter-evidence that (1) competition occurs in every society throughout history whenever humans seek to survive and thrive; and (2) competition does not necessarily lead to inequality, but often serves as a tool to mitigate it, as competitions prevent absolute hegemony and allow individuals to challenge incumbent powers or privileged groups across cultures, systems, and eras. This closing chapter encourages readers to reassess their existing beliefs about the sources and consequences of competition and to strive for a deep understanding of competition arenas that they may choose to enter or inadvertently launch.

The ideology of Marxism–Leninism seemingly contradicts competition, yet competition was prevalent in former communist countries to foster productivity and economic growth. The Stakhanovite movement, originating in the Soviet Union, incentivized laborers to excel as an economic propaganda tool, while also honoring them as socialist heroes but also penalizing dissent as a political propaganda tool. Competition extended to managers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) vying for government resources. Consumer competition arose from pervasive shortages, driving black market economies. Underground enterprises, which were protected from competition, resisted economic reform from a planned economic system to a more market-oriented system to maintain their privileged status. Post-World War II, some SOEs adopted market-based approaches, competing domestically and globally. This chapter argues that such forms of competition emerge when humans struggle for survival amid perceived inequalities in the existing system, prompting them to seek opportunities and thrive.

Just as we would be remiss to skip past a discussion of the role of entrepreneurs in innovation, we would be remiss to skip over the role of the state. In this chapter, we move through three starkly different visions of what role government ought to play in bringing about innovation in the economy. The first paper discussed, by Acemoglu & Robinson, suggests that the state actually plays a key role in creating the institutions that make innovation worthwhile. The second reading, a set of chapters from a book by Mazzucato, argues that this institution-oriented view is too limited, provides evidence of how ‘entrepreneurial states’ can also work to develop innovations, and suggests that this implies a state that is much more active in investing in and directing innovation. The third reading turns up this argument further, arguing that the urgency of the global climate crisis and the vast economic reorganization that it demands means that the state should not just be more active in investing and directing: the crisis, it argues, can only be solved by a complete socialization of the economy, by the state actively managing innovation and production.

The friendship between Shaw and O’Casey was so personally significant that O’Casey’s widow published an entire book on the subject. This chapter charts the course of that friendship, and examines the influence that Shaw exerted upon O’Casey and vice versa. The chapter begins by examining the way O’Casey knew of Shaw’s work before their first meeting, and traces the contours of their personal relationship after O’Casey moved to London in 1926. The chapter analyses the way that, once the Abbey had rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928, O’Casey turned to Bernard Shaw for friendship and advice, and gives a close reading of the reciprocal influence that can be found in the two men’s playwriting and political viewpoints.

This chapter discusses Sean O’Casey’s drama performed in Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. The main focus is on plays addressing political turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. Some German-speaking audiences for these plays were confronted with similar crises at the time that the plays were produced in the German language. As a hotspot of the East–West conflict, O’Casey’s plays performed in Berlin are of particular interest, and this chapter concludes with an appendix that lists key Germanophone premieres.

This opening chapter situates O’Casey in the Dublin of his time, describing the existence of O’Casey’s Protestant family in Dublin’s Northside. The chapter contrasts that lower-middle-class existence with the disease and insecurity of the slum areas of Dublin. We encounter the political and cultural sensibilities of the Irish capital’s Catholic working-class population, a population that profoundly affected O’Casey’s life and work. The chapter shows O’Casey to be a writer who moved between and across social and cultural groupings in Dublin, with this part of the volume highlighting the Irish capital’s differing religious and political affiliations in the early twentieth century.

This chapter analyses the place of class in O’Casey’s thinking and focuses in particular on a relatively unknown O’Casey script from 1919, The Harvest Festival, which revolves around a charismatic worker-hero who dies when a strike becomes violent. The chapter also examines the rewritten version of that play, Red Roses for Me (1943), in order to explore how O’Casey’s aestheticizing of class confrontation was developed and refined. The chapter shows how O’Casey wanted class analysis to replace ideologies like religion and nationalism, which he believed to be misdirections of humanity’s important longings.

This chapter explores favela upgrading in the communities of Pavão-Pavãozinho and Cantagalo in the wake of a terrible mudslide in 1983, under the administration of socialist governor Leonel Brizola. The chapter explores the huge ambitions of Brizola’s administration and the linked upgrading projects in Pavão-Pavãozinho in particular, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of those projects, and places this in the context of larger economic, political and demographic transitions in the city.