Page 82 - CONSCIENCISM By Kwame Nkrumah_Neat

7 6 CONSCIENCISM SOCIETY AND IDEOLOGY 77
can be said to be adequate. Here we discern one of capitalism's materialism suggests a socialist philosophy I have explained in my
deadly sins. Under this social-political system, man's materialist sccond chapter.
approach to nature loses its bearings. It sheds its humanist stimulus In sum, the restitution of Africa's humanist and egalitarian
under the impulse ofthe profit motivc. Ifhappincss is defmed in the principles of society requires socialism. It is materialism that
context ofsociety, thcn happiness becomes that fecling which an ensures the only effective transformation ofnature, and socialism
individual derives, from a given economic, political and cultural that derives the highest development from this transformation.
context, that he is in a position to make good his aspirations. Since
capitalist development is unfortmlately a process in which a
rapacious oligarchy is pitted against an exploited mass. happiness,
according to this definition, is denied to many. The achievements
ofthe capitalist oligarchy defme new limits ofwhat is attainable by
the individual, and thereby push outward the frontiers oflegitimate
aspirations. But capitalism is a system in which these limiting
aspirations are by defmition denied to the people, and only reserved
for a few.
The evil of capitalism consists in its alienation of the fruit of
labour from those who with the toil oftheir body and the sweat of
their brow produce this fruit. This aspect of capitalism makes it
irreconcilable with those basic principles which animate the
traditional African society. Capitalism is unjust; in our newly
independent cotmtries it is not only too complicated to be work­
able, it is also alien.
Under socialism, however, the study and mastery ofnature has a
humanist impulse, and is directed not towards a profiteering
accomplishment, but the affording of ever-increasing satisfaction
for the material and spiritual needs ofthe greatest number. Ideas of
transformation and development, in so far as they relate to the
purposes ofsociety as a whole and not to an oligarch purpose, are
properly speaking appropriate to socialism.
On the philosophical level, too, it is materialism, not idealism,
that in one form or another will give the flrmest conceptual basis to
the restitution of Africa's egalitarian and humanist principles.
Idealism breeds an oligarchy, and its social implication, as drawn
out in my second chapter, is obnoxious to Mrican society. It is
materialism, with its monistic and naturalistic account of nature,
which will balk arbitrariness, inequality and injustice. How·