On 8/23/2020 7:50 PM, Dan La Botz wrote:
communist stalwarts in the West, like Lessing, felt they’d had the carpet pulled out from under them.
Was she really a communist? Yes, technically, for awhile via membership in a Zimbabwe old-style party. But really? More "God that Failed" type, perhaps?
I spent a bit of time in a beautiful old mountain farmhouse - which at one point cost $1/night to rent - that her son owned in the far east of Zimbabwe, where she spent some extended periods, but I never met her. Nevertheless, here's how I recall her role, in a 1998 book, Uneven Zimbabwe, published by Africa World Press.
Thinly-veiled racist overtones often distinguished liberal attacks on the socialist project in Africa. In her autobiography, renowned writer Doris Lessing recounted, from early adulthood (during World War II), membership in a tiny, lily-white Southern Rhodesian Communist Party which soon disintegrated, apparently because of the group’s total failure to tap into the kind of organic radicalism of black workers that generated a general strike in 1946. Bitter, Lessing (1994, 279) had inexplicably concluded that “Communism was too abstract and inhuman an idea to satisfy Africans – and in fact, when later there were Communist or Marxist regimes, they did not last long.” Lessing (1994, 367) considered post-independence Zimbabwe a “Communist government, too extreme for the natural temper and style of the black people.” -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#778): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/778 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76368144/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
