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On 24 February 1966, the National Liberation Council (NLC), renegades of the Ghanaian armed forces, with Western support, overthrew the Ghanaian head of state Kwame Nkrumah as he flew to China. 1 The coup d’é·tat marked a political-economic rupture in the nascent histories of both Ghana and socialism in Africa. Whereas Ghana’s Independence Day (6 March 1957) bequeathed hope and vindication to Black people, African liberationists, anti-imperialists, and anti-colonialists globally, the events of 24 February offered a dystopian break. 2 The tripartite combination of Ghana’s slide into one-party and increasingly authoritarian rule, the forced resignation of high court judges, and Ghana’s faltering economy had already precipitated an intellectual and political-economic inquest into the correctness and shortcomings of Nkrumah’s reign and his political-economic philosophies. 3 The coup d’état exacerbated and expedited that scrutiny, often in the most unflattering ways. 4 I revisit two debates that emerged from this crisis: the first over Nkrumah’s intellectual and political-economic connections with the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, and the second over whether capitalism and socialism could coexist within a Marxist framework. 5
During the 1960s and 1970s, Black Marxists held contrasting positions about whether a combination of capitalism and socialism was an intellectually coherent Marxist policy. 6 The Caribbean Marxist historians Walter Rodney and C.L.R. James represented the two differing sides. In a 1975 lecture at Queens College in New York City, Rodney dismissed the notion that capitalism and socialism could coexist. He characterized Nkrumah’s political-economic project as unviable because it was a “mish-mash” of socialism and capitalism. For Rodney, Nkrumah’s socialist policies were “whimsical” and failed to address the contradiction between “socialist premises” and the capitalist system, which could not coexist within a singular economic model. 7 James disagreed, arguing that capitalism and socialism could exist side-by-side, concluding that a combination of capitalist and socialist modes of production was at the root of the Soviet Union’s 1920s economic philosophy and political-economic project. He defined this state of affairs as state capitalism and questioned how anyone could understand the Soviet system as anything else. 8
This paper wades into the Rodney-James debate by reconceptualizing Nkrumah’s links to Lenin’s state capitalism ideas and offers two arguments. First, that a combination of socialist and capitalist development paths—a hallmark of Nkrumah’s Ghanaian...