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The October Russian Revolution of 1917 inaugurated the era of social transformation challenging the dominance of global capitalism.1It set in motion two lineages, one tracing its ancestry directly to October and its Marxist leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Among these must be included the Chinese revolution of 1949, the Vietnamese revolution of 1945, and the Cuban revolution of 1959. The second lineage is that of national liberation movements in the former colonized countries of Africa and Asia. Tanzania's independence movement Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) under the leadership of Julius Nyerere was one such national-popular movement that questioned both capitalism and imperialism with its blueprint called the Arusha Declaration: policy of socialism and self-reliance proclaimed in 1967. This essay focuses on Nyerere's philosophical and political outlook and his contentious relationship with Marxism. It also documents the intellectual history of Marxist ideas in Tanzania.

This article interrogates the concept of 'working people'. Lenin and other classical Marxists commonly used terms like labouring people, working people, or rural poor. Typically, they were used as descriptive, or, at best, as terms of political art rather than theoretical science. The inspiration in this article for the use of the term 'working people' comes from Walter Rodney. Building on previous work, the article relates the concept of working people to a modified definition of primitive accumulation under neo-liberalism, that is, as a process of surplus extraction by capital based on expropriation of a part of necessary consumption of the producer. It is argued that this is the material basis common to all sectors of what is here understood as working people.

This article raises four issues which were very dear to Sam. All are, in a sense, classical questions, very commonly debated among Marxists, but need to continue to be address anew, in concrete situations. The first is the category of 'the peasant', in its analytical and empirical dimensions; the second is the relationship between the peasant question and the national question; the third is the form and character of accumulation in the agrarian sector; and the fourth relates to social agency for transformation and forms of its organization. These issues are raised somewhat tentatively, in order to contribute to the ongoing debate.

NGOs and social activists run the risk of following the policy directions favoured by foreign donor agencies to the detriment of their own organisational and moral capacity to act in solidarity with those whose interests they claim to support. With specific reference to Tanzania, the author argues that while NGOs readily take action to protect their own interests, they do not consistently stand up for the basic freedoms of working people. In a unipolar era, which holds that the age of politics and international solidarity is over, it is vital for NGOs and other social activists to keep alive the belief that an alternative to the existing world is both necessary and possible. (InWent/DÜI)

The following was the Keynote Address at the International Conference to celebrate the Life of Comrade Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, 21-22 September 2001, University of Dar es Salaam. Babu died on 5 August 1996 and later that year, ROAPE published a special issue devoted to our dear friend and comrade (ROAPE 69).

Presents the text of the Keynote Address at the International Conference to Celebrate the Life of Comrade Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, held 21-22 Sept 2001 at the U of Dar es Salaam. Babu died on 5 Aug 1996 & later that year, this journal published a special issue devoted to our dear friend & comrade. 5 References. Adapted from the source document.