Zeyad el Nabolsy
Abdulrahman Mohammed Babu (1924–1996) was one of the most significant African Marxist thinkers and political figures of the twentieth century. One of the key problems that confronted Babu was the claim that Marxism was a Western product, marked by the particular concerns of the West, and thus could not be applied elsewhere. In response, Babu argued that the materialist conception of history is not exclusive to the West. Babu claimed that Ibn Khaldun anticipated some of the elements of Marx’s thought.
Babu, however, did not provide any evidence in support of his claim, although such evidence exists. Despite some overemphasis on these similarities from Babu, the comparison does raise interesting questions about what it means to speak of historical materialism prior to Marx.
Babu and the Problem of Eurocentrism
Abdulrahman Mohammed Babu (1924–1996) was one of the most significant African Marxist thinkers and political figures of the twentieth century. Babu was born and grew up in Zanzibar, where he played a significant role in the anticolonial movement. Babu was fascinated by the Chinese Revolution, and he visited China in 1949, where he met with the leaders of the Communist Party of China. In 1964, he assumed the position of foreign minister in the revolutionary government led by Abeid Karume, which was formed following the Zanzibar Revolution (Amin 1998). His revolutionary Marxism and his close connections with China were seen as a threat by U.S. officials, who attempted to neutralize what they perceived to be his attempt to turn Zanzibar into an “African Cuba” by engineering the unification of Zanzibar with Tanganyika in April 1964 (Wilson 2013). Babu played a crucial role in fostering the relationship between China and Tanzania, and he accompanied Nyerere on his state visit to China in 1965 (Wilson 2007). Babu’s critical attitude, formulated from a Marxist standpoint, towards Julius K. Nyerere’s “African socialism,” led to tensions between them. Eventually, Babu was imprisoned by Nyerere’s Tanzanian government from 1972 to 1978. In 1979, Babu left Tanzania to teach in the United States, and in 1984 he moved to London. In exile, he continued his quest to develop a version of Marxism suitable for East African conditions through contributions to journals such as The Journal of African Marxists, Review of African Political Economy, Third World Book Review, and Africa World Review. He also served as an adviser to progressive movements from Eritrea, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda.
One of the key problems that confronted Babu was the claim that Marxism was the product of the West and thus marked by the particular concerns of the West, such that it could not be applied elsewhere. In particular, African socialists, such as Julius Nyerere and Leopold Senghor contended that one could not adopt the Marxist theoretical framework without doing tremendous violence both to the descriptive facts of African social reality and to the normative values which were expressed in African traditions. Given this perceived opposition, it is no surprise that, at a time when African independence was the rallying cry, there would be a rejection of any suggestion that Africans should follow a theory which was developed elsewhere for a different historical context. The claim here was that the adoption of Marxism would involve a kind of abdication of intellectual autonomy (Senghor 1968, 103; Senghor 1961, 134). Nyerere in fact explicitly accused some African Marxists of dogmatism and of lacking autonomy (Nyerere 1968, 301).
A key charge that was levelled by critics of African Marxism (or Marxism in Africa, as Babu would have preferred) is that Marxism, insofar as it postulates the explanatory primacy of social relations of production and the development (or retardation) of the productive forces, projects a concern with material factors that is not universal to all human societies or civilizations. Instead, the criticism goes, this concern with material interests as drivers of human history is an exclusively Western concern which cannot be foisted onto other societies. A contemporary salient example of this criticism is the one levelled by Cedric Robinson in his book, Black Marxism. Robinson claims that there is “an African tradition” at the core of the resistance of Black people to enslavement in the New World from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. When it comes to specifying what this tradition is supposed to be, Robinson writes that “its focus was on structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics, not the material” (Robinson 2020 [1983], 169). It seems that Robinson wishes to say, just as the non-Marxist African socialists wished to say, that on the African continent material interests are not the primary drivers of human behaviour. Consequently, a theory of history which accords explanatory priority to social relations of production and the development (or retardation) of the productive forces is not suitable for explaining African societies.
Babu in his 1986 article, “Ideologies and the Third World”, is responding to a similar claim that was made by the Kenyan intellectual, Ali Mazrui. Mazrui, following Ali Shari‘ati, talks of the “Westerness of the Marxist paradigm” as well as the “ethnocentricity of the whole theory of historical materialism” (Mazrui 1986, 10). Babu makes two moves in response to this criticism. First, he argues that even if Marxism first originated in the West, it does not follow that the range of cases to which it can be applied is restricted to the West, simply because it would be fallacious to “territorialize” ideas in this manner. As we know from human history, ideas (whether they be religious, philosophical, political, or scientific ideas) travel globally and are taken up and mastered at places that are quite distant, spatially and temporally, from their point of origin. For example, even though Aristotle developed his thesis that a “human being is by nature a political animal” (1253a) in the context of the existence of a slave society in ancient Athens, it does not follow that his notion of the essential sociality of humans can have no applicability in societies that are radically different from the slave society of ancient Athens (indeed, both Ibn Khaldun and Marx draw on Aristotle’s account of the natural sociality of humans). The second response that Babu puts forward is that the materialist conception of history does not exclusively arise in the West.
According to Babu, Marx’s “great contribution to human thought include his labour theory of value, the source of surplus value, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – his concepts like modes of production and others” (Babu 2002 [1986], 286). Babu argues that at least some of these notions “were pioneered by Abdulrahman Ibn Khaldun…[a] Berber” (Babu 2002 [1986], 286). Babu contends that it was “[Ibn] Khaldun who first pointed out that value was created at the point of production and not at the point of exchange” (Babu 2002 [1986], 286). Babu does not provide textual evidence in support of his claim, but we can provide it on his behalf.
Ibn Khaldun and the Labour Theory of Value
Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406) in the fifth chapter of his Muqaddimah provides an account of the role of labour in the creation of value that seems quite close to Marx’s account in some important respects: “everything comes from God. But human labour [al-aʿmal al-insaniyah] is necessary for every profit and capital accumulation. When (the source of profit) is work as such, as, for instance, (in the exercise of) crafts [sanaʿa], this is obvious” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, p. 298; Ibn Khaldun 2016, 448). However, Ibn Khaldun is also aware that the idea that labour is the source of value (which he, unlike Marx, seems to equate with profit, but he vacillates on this point) is not so apparent in other cases. Thus, he adds that “when the source of gain is animals, plants, or minerals, human labour [al-ʿamal al-insani] is still necessary. Without it, no gain will be obtained, and there will be no useful (result)” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, p. 298; Ibn Khaldun 2016, 448). For example, Ibn Khaldun held that the price of food items is determined by the amount of labour power that has gone into making them (although we should note that he does not have a measure of this quantity of labour power in terms of something like socially necessary labour time): “labour may be concealed. This is the case, for instance, with the price of foodstuffs. The labour [al-ʿamal] and expenditure that have gone into them show themselves in the price of grain” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, 298; Ibn Khaldun 2016, p. 448).
Admittedly Ibn Khaldun vacillates on the question of whether labour is the sole source of value. However, he does claim that “gains [al-moufadat] and profits [al-mouktasabat], in their entirety or for the most part, are value realized from human labour” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, 298; Ibn Khaldun 2016, pp. 448 – 449).
Ibn Khaldun and the Materialist Conception of History
Babu adds that Ibn Khaldun also anticipated Marx in studying social formations and historical epochs not by focusing on their self-image but rather by studying their concrete conditions and the requirements that come with the demarcation of specific social roles in a specific social formation. Babu writes that Ibn Khaldun, “introduced, long before Hume and a lot more profoundly than him, the method of observing and analysing concretely the objective realities surrounding a particular society” (Babu 2002 [1986], 286). In the second chapter of his Muqaddimah he starts from the assumption that “differences of condition among different people [al-ajial] are the result of the different ways in which they make their living” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, 91; Ibn Khaldun 2016, 131). One can compare this with the programmatic statement by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology that “the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history […] namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’ But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition [Grundbedinung] of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life […] Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance.” (Marx and Engels 1973, 30; Marx and Engels 1978, 28). This is essentially Ibn Khaldun’s starting point.
It is interesting to note that Marx and Engels do not think that the materialist conception of history is an expression of a collective Western ethos. In fact, the whole point of The German Ideology is to show that the aforementioned “fundamental fact” has never been grasped appropriately by classical German philosophy. As Marx and Engels put it “It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis [irdische Basis] for history and consequently never an historian. The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry.” (Marx and Engels 1973, 30; Marx and Engels 1978, 28). Marx and Engels do not present their theory as an expression of the materialist core of the most sophisticated articulation of philosophical thought in nineteenth-century Europe. Rather they are rebelling against it. Hence it makes no sense to speak of the materialist conception of history as expressing the philosophical essence of Western civilization. Furthermore Marx and Engels are obviously wrong when they say that it was the English and the French who made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialist basis. This honour, Babu would say, belongs to a fourteenth-century North African, namely Ibn Khaldun.
The Aristotelian Legacy: Corporeality and Sociality
Ibn Khaldun held that the manner in which one makes one’s living shapes the character of both individuals as representatives of social types as well as the mental outlooks of different societies. For example, when speaking of merchants as a social type, he states that “a merchant must concern himself with buying and selling, earning money and making a profit. This requires cunning, willingness to enter into disputes, cleverness, constant quarrelling, and great persistence. These are things that belong to commerce. They are qualities detrimental to and destructive of virtuousness and manliness, because it is unavoidable that action influences the soul” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, 313; Ibn Khaldun 2016, p. 468). The idea that action influences the soul obviously refers to Aristotle’s emphasis on habit and on the fundamental corporeality of human capacities and powers. Ibn Khaldun holds that: “the habitus of the crafts [malakat al-sanaʿa] provides intelligence. Perfect sedentary culture [hadara] provides intelligence, because it is a conglomerate of crafts characterized by concern for the (domestic) economy, contact with one’s fellow men, attainment of education through mixing (with one’s fellow men)” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, p. 331; Ibn Khaldun 2016, p. 510). For Ibn Khaldun the most important thing about human habitus is that they are all corporeal: “all habitus are corporeal [al-malakat kulaha jousmaniah], whether they are of the body, or, like arithmetic, of the brain” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, 340; Ibn Khaldun 2016, 514). The corporeality of all habitus means, according to Ibn Khaldun, that they must be refined and cultivated in practice (which goes beyond empirical observation in the contemplative sense).
Note that for Ibn Khaldun, just like for Aristotle (and for Marx), the individual whose powers and capacities have this inescapable corporeal existence is not an isolated individual, “by his very nature, he needs the cooperation of others to satisfy all his needs” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, 336). The habitus which shapes our thinking is therefore not only corporeal, it is also fundamentally social. Compare this to Marx and Engels’ claim in The German Ideology that “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour [materiellen Vehaltens]” (Marx and Engels 1973, 24 – 25; Marx and Engels 1978, 26). Yves Lacoste has noted that there are some anticipations of historical materialism in Ibn Khaldun’s thought, but he claimed that these are scattered remarks not based on philosophical-systematic considerations (Lacoste 1984, 158). However, if one focuses on the role of habitus as the corporeal activity of an essentially social being in Ibn Khaldun’s account of human cognition, it becomes apparent that there is, in fact, a systematic philosophical basis for Ibn Khaldun’s proto-historical materialism.
One consequence of Ibn Khaldun’s proto-historical materialism is that differences in the intellectual or scientific achievements of different peoples are not explained by appealing to different spiritual or biological essences rather they are to be explained by differences in their social environment. In the sixth chapter of the Muqaddimah he states that “if one compares sedentary people with Bedouins, one notices how much more insight and cleverness sedentary peoples have. One might, thus, come to think that they really differ from the Bedouins in the reality of humanity and in intelligence [ʿaqlhu]. This is not so. The only reason for the difference is that sedentary peoples developed their powers in the crafts as far as customary and sedentary conditions are concerned […] the seeming (superiority of) of sedentary people is merely the result of a certain polish the crafts and scientific instruction give them” (Ibn Khaldun 2005, p. 343; 2016, 517).
Like Marx, Ibn Khaldun, thinks that some modes of socio-economic existence allow humans to grasp nature in a better way than other modes of socio-economic existence. Talk of relative superiority or relative inferiority inevitably raises questions about prejudice and Eurocentrism. Here, it is important to note that Marx and Engels were important for many nationalist thinkers in the Global South not because they showed them that there was nothing wrong with their societies, but rather precisely because they provided them with a non-racial and non-spiritual (or cultural) explanation of the deficiencies of their own societies. This was the case in China (Mao 1969 [1949]), Ireland (Connolly 1983 [1910]), Palestine, Guinea-Bissau (El Nabolsy, 2025), and elsewhere. In the aftermath of defeat in the face of European capitalist powers in the nineteenth century, there was no escape from attempts to answer questions such as why the early modern scientific revolution occurred only in early modern Europe and not in China, for example (Needham 2005 [1969]). Nationalist thinkers in the Global South did not need an account of how despite their own societies’ vulnerability to conquest and exploitation, there was in fact nothing wrong with them. Ibn Khaldun can be understood as providing a similarly non-racial and non-cultural, materialist explanation of disparities between different societies, and implicitly, a recipe for overcoming such disparities.
Methodological Remarks
Babu’s claim that Ibn Khaldun anticipates some of the core claims of historical materialism is plausible. However, one must admit that Babu is guilty of overreaching when he claims that “the ‘Westerness’ of Marx is the ‘Easterness’ of [Ibn] Khaldun in that although vastly different epochs of history separated them they both taught that only a revolution of the oppressed through their solidarity can bring about significant changes that would enable society for the first time to direct its own history” (Babu 2002 [1986], 88]. Ibn Khaldun did think that ʿasabiya or group feeling plays a key explanatory role in the rise and fall of dynasties (Ibn Khaldun 2005, 101), but he did not place any special emphasis on the ʿasabiya of the oppressed as the key motor of history. Moreover, Ibn Khaldun, unlike Marx, held a cyclical view of history (Dale 2015, 5). For Ibn Khaldun there is no possibility of breaking out of the cycle of dynastic rule. For Ibn Khaldun the cycle involves the conquest by a Bedouin group that has a high level of ʿasabiya of the urban settlements that are dominated by a dynasty that has a degraded level of ʿasabiya, the newly dominant group settles and the leadership takes on the trappings of power and isolates itself from its base, which weakens the level of ʿasabiya of the conquering group. This cycle lasts about four generations. However, class polarization does play a role in Ibn Khaldun’s account. It is precisely the class polarization that occurs once the nomadic group settles that undermines their ʿasabiya (Alatas 2013, 60 – 66). To this extent we can understand Ibn Khaldun’s notion of ʿasabiya as, at least in part, explaining how class polarization can be overcome by the elite in a particular social group. To this extent, it touches on questions raised by the notion of ideology (in the pejorative sense) in Marx’s theory.
The interesting question is: what explains the fact that Ibn Khaldun was able to anticipate some aspects of historical materialism but not others? More specifically, can one come up with a historical materialist explanation of what Ibn Khaldun accomplished? Marx believed that Aristotle was quite close to discovering the labour theory of value, but that he was thwarted from doing so by the fact that he lived in a slave society, because it prevented him from forming a concept of human labour power in general without qualitative distinctions: “Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact, that, in the form of commodity-values, all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore as labour of equal quality, by inspection from the form of value, because Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and their labour-powers [die ungleichheit der Menschen und ihre Arbeitskräfte] ” (Marx 1990, 151 – 152; Marx 2016, 33). Note here that Marx’s account presupposes a strong connection between possible forms of human cognition and the socio-corporeal mode of existence of the thinker in his environment. This is precisely what we find in Ibn Khaldun. North African societies in the fourteenth century were societies with slaves, but not slave societies, i.e., slavery was not the dominant form of labour. To this extent, Ibn Khaldun was liberated from the obstacle that Aristotle faced. While Ibn Khaldun’s proto-historical materialism drew on elements already present in Aristotle, he was able to take a step towards the labour theory of value that Aristotle could not take due to the limitations of his social environment.
A potentially fruitful approach is to catalogue the various forms of proto-historical materialist thought which have emerged across different human societies in history and to understand under what conditions these forms of thought were expressed. Indeed, if historical materialism had no precursors at all in different societies, and if it expressed a form of thinking that was entirely alien to non-Western societies, then its tremendous appeal in non-Western societies during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would amount to something of a miracle. When we say that Marxism first emerged in the West during the nineteenth century, we should not think that all of the constitutive elements of historical materialism emerged all together at the same time out of the blue. It is more plausible to hold that the emergence of historical materialism in the West was the product of a set of circumstances that allowed for the systematic articulation of elements or ideas that had hitherto existed in an inchoate form in Western social formations. If we take this approach, then it would not be surprising if some of these elements or ideas have arisen and circulated, albeit in an inchoate form, in non-Western societies across human history.
Zeyad el Nabolsy is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He specializes in the history of African philosophy and science. He also has research interests in Kant and Hegel, Marxist philosophy (with a focus on philosophy of science), as well as in the history and philosophy of the social sciences, and comparative philosophy.
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