In 1981 a radical journal was launched on the side of 'struggling people' and against so-called 'African socialism'. The Journal of African Marxists published articles, reviews and briefings but also organised conferences and local committees across the continent. The journal sought to 'to stimulate the...
In this blogpost Tim Di Muzio describes how the perspective of capital as power may help to understand, explain and critique aspects of political economy in Africa. Old traditions and perspectives, Di Muzio argues, continue to have a stranglehold on political economy yet the approach...
Arndt Hopfmann asks what the legacy of the Russian Revolution can tell us about industrialisation and radical political transformation in the Global South, and in Africa in particular. He argues that there are lessons for the political economy of development and industrialization policies that must...
The Review of African Political Economy is convening a series of three workshops in Africa in the 2017-18 period to explore Structural Transformations in Africa today: interventions from the Left. The workshops will help link analysis and activism in contemporary Africa from the perspective of...
Gretta Digbeu argues that domestic resource mobilization, which was a major preoccupation for early development economists in the period before the neoliberal counter-revolution, has become an increasingly pressing issue for African countries in the context of financial liberalization, rising external debt and capital flight. ...
The first installment of this three-part blogpost John Smith summarises evidence showing that, during the neoliberal era, African poverty has increased both absolutely and relative to the income and wealth of the average person in Europe and North America, notwithstanding the much-hyped rise of Africa’s...
In a world where the logic of capitalism forces the unemployed into precarious employment, yet insists that we all constantly ‘improve’ ourselves, Faisal Garba reviews two books that ask what is the role of knowledge production....