One of the virtues of You Say You Want a Revolution is that it admits and illuminates, though it does not altogether explain, the failure of post-colonial regimes in Africa — even those that were established without much in the way of violent struggle. The first generation of post-colonial leaders were so taken by the prestige and perhaps by the glamour of revolution that they employed revolutionary rhetoric themselves, and sometimes went in for utopian schemes of their own. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, for example (he is not mentioned in the book), was bitten by the bug of utopianism, caught in part from socialists at the University of Edinburgh, calling the sole permitted political party in Tanzania the Party of the Revolution. In the name of creating a just and equal society, he forcibly removed at least 70 per cent of the population from where it was living and herded it into collectivised villages. This was, all too predictably, an economic disaster, famine having been prevented only by large infusions of foreign aid, but it served the interests of members of the Party. Tanzania was saved from being much worse than it was by the fact that Nyerere, though perfectly capable of ruthlessness, was not personally a monster, and also by the peaceful nature of the Tanzania people themselves. Another saving grace was that there was no ethnic group that could have become dominant, so ethnic antagonism could not be added to the witches’ brew.
This illustrates a point that Professor Chirot makes clear in his discussion as to why the Vietnamese communist regime, though often brutal, never descended to anything like the level of horror of neighbouring Cambodia. Among the factors must surely have been the character and personality of the leaders as well as of the countries themselves. In other words, the fate of countries cannot be reduced, either in prospect or in retrospect, to an invariable formula. Human affairs will, to an extent, always be incalculable.
Still, some degree of regularity is possible. I was rather surprised that Professor Chirot overlooked one such. He writes the following of the corruption endemic under communist regimes: “a function of a deliberately exploitative, thieving elite that staved the general economy by its dishonesty than it was the essence of the system itself. Avoiding corruption was impossible because without it the society could not function.”
What is surprising here is that he does not mention why it could not function, but the answer seems to me perfectly obvious: it was because the communist system abolished the price system and substituted political decision-making in its place. This explanation is sufficient, for where there are no prices, and the economy is thereby largely demonetarised, goods and services can be distributed only by corruption. This is not to say that where there is a price system there will automatically be no corruption, obviously this is not the case; but such corruption will be limited by the very need for money to retain its value where such a price system exists. To that extent, it imposes at least a degree of honesty. The mystery of the Soviet Union or any other communist country is not why it produced so little, but why it produced anything at all: and here Professor Chirot is quite right. The answer is because of corruption: an “honest” communist state would produce nothing. It could not survive.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Longing for Revolution”, New English Review, 2020-05-13.
September 27, 2025
QotD: Utopian revolution
October 17, 2022
QotD: Julius Nyerere
One day, the not very difficult thought occurred to me that Nyerere’s stated aim was not the real aim, that the aim of his policies was not the economic development of the country or anything like it, but rather the maintenance of himself and his cronies in power. Once I made this simple assumption, I could see what should have been obvious to me from the first: that far from being a miserable failure, Nyerere was a brilliant and outstanding success. Not only had he maintained himself in power for more than twenty years with very little challenge, apart from an early attempt at a coup by the army, but he had successfully managed to present himself to the world as a man of outstanding principle: indeed, there are even now moves afoot by the Catholic Church, to which he was more attached even than he was to Kim Il Sung, to canonise him, notwithstanding his imprisonment of political opponents and his forced removal of the peasantry from where it was living into collectivised villages. One of his miracles was to have extracted huge sums of aid money from the willing dupes of Scandinavia and elsewhere, which disappeared in Tanzania as water through sand but was so essential to him in the maintenance of his power.
If the aim of politicians is the attainment of power, Nyerere was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century, and very far from the fool or incompetent that I had thought him.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Brexit Doesn’t Mean Brexit”, Law & Liberty, 2019-04-15.
March 6, 2019
The “grandmother hypothesis”
Jonathan Lambert on the theory for why, almost alone among species, human females live on well past their reproductive years:
Killer whales, Japanese aphids and Homo sapiens — they’re among the few organisms whose females live on long past the age of reproduction.
Since the name of the evolutionary game is survival and reproduction, the phenomenon begs explanation — why live longer than you can reproduce? In the 1960s, researchers came up with the “grandmother hypothesis” to explain the human side of things. The hypothesis is that the help of grandmothers enables mothers to have more children. So women who had the genetic makeup for longer living would ultimately have more grandchildren carrying their longevity genes. (Sorry, grandfathers, you’re not included in this picture.)
Two studies published Thursday in Current Biology take another look at this hypothesis and add new insights into the role grandmothers play.
The first hard evidence for the grandmother hypothesis was gathered by Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah who was studying the Hadza people, a group of hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania. Hawkes was struck by “how productive these old ladies were” at foraging for food, and she later documented how their help allowed mothers to have more children.
If our long post-reproductive lives evolved because of grandmothers, we should be able to find fingerprints of the benefits of grandmothering in many cultures. But the circumstances of modern life differ drastically from those we faced at the beginning of our evolutionary story.
The studies in Current Biology turned to the detailed records of two preindustrial populations, one in what is now Quebec and the other in Finland. The researchers mined these rich databases to quantify the reproductive boost that grandmothers provide and to help us better understand the limits of their help.
H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.
