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The Political Thought of Patrice Lumumba* 111
his cell. They become an object of fascinated meditation for everyone. This became clear
at Thysville when the soldiers who were guarding him mutinied: if they did not receive
their pay, they would release Lumumba, they said. In panic at this threat, the leaders in
Léopoldville approached the Katanganese. A deal was struck: Tschombe would pay; in
exchange, he would be given Lumumba. In short, even from his prison the deposed prime
minister bore witness to the necessity of centralism, all the more so as his fall coincided
with a sudden flare-up of riots and local wars.
More was to come: from October onwards an upsurge in revolutionary disturbances
became noticeable. This time it was the rank and file – peasants and workers – who had
rallied against the maintenance of the colonialist economy. These scattered movements
had no common aim: however, it would have been possible to unite them, beyond the old
divisions, if their demands had been brought together in a common programme. This was
no hysterical fear: later, Gizenga, the new leader of centralism, took radical measures in
Stanleyville: multi-national corporations were to be Africanized and Belgians placed
under house arrest and subject to an exceptional tax; after six months, the State would
seize the abandoned possessions. These decrees marked the beginnings of a
rapprochement between the concrete demands of the masses, lacking a genuine
perspective, and the abstract Jacobinism of the MNC. And Gizenga did not share
Lumumba’s popularity or his intelligence. What would we have had to fear if the former
prime minister had himself grasped that what was required was to reconnect with the
masses, break with the évolués and give a social content to his unitary politics, in short, to
stir up the people against neo-capitalist mystification? That was indeed the whole
problem: Jacobinism is petty bourgeois; it subordinates the economy to political
integration and constantly collides with the demands of the masses, which it accuses of
sabotaging unity. This conflict usually allows enemies to defeat one after the other the
unitary movement and the workers’ movement. But if the Jacobins manage to survive for
a while – and that is extremely rare – they are enlightened by their setbacks and make a
fresh start: unity is no longer the beginning but an intermediary stage, the only way of
cementing together the interests of the masses and their demands. It is also the final goal
of an economic, social and political revolution which, at the risk of breaking up, must
undergo continuous radicalization. I have met young people from the towns – former
students from the middle classes – who were part of Castro’s government: they were
Jacobins against Batista. Having joined the rebels, they had no difficulty in temporarily
abandoning their political ideal to regain it through the movement of socialist
construction. Robespierre and Lumumba died too soon to effect the synthesis which
would have made them invincible. And in the France of 1789 as in the Congo of 1961,
the masses were still mainly rural; in France, the proletariat had not yet been born or
properly developed; in the Congo, Belgian paternalism had stupefied it. In neither case
did the real victims of exploitation have representatives or an apparatus which could
appeal to the politicians to seek unity in the struggle against exploitation. All the same:
there are 3 million black proletarians in the Congo; had Patrice lived, he might well have
ended up inciting them against his own class out of disappointment with it. The fiction he
never exposed, the crazy bourgeois idea of the ‘universal class’ might, under certain
conditions, have facilitated various rapprochements: Lumumba might have been able to
approach the local leaders of the revolutionary movements without guilt or a superiority