Warring Libya: an outpost of global class war

September 3, 2020

In a major article published in ROAPE, and now available to access for free, Matteo Capasso re-frames the war in Libya by showing how US-led imperialism underlies the ongoing war and militarism that have contributed to the destruction of the country. In this blogpost, Capasso argues that war, militarism and killing have imposed themselves as new mechanisms of social reproduction and capital accumulation at the global level.

By Matteo Capasso

The history of colonialism and imperialism is a history of absolute or relative slaughter, depending on the balances of the class struggle. In our current age, where multiple and interlinked crises (including the ongoing pandemic) reveal the devastating power of neoliberal capitalist accumulation, class struggle is intensifying at the global level. Therefore, it is not surprising that the US-led imperialist structure has progressively embraced war and militarism to reshape the ways in which countries of the Global South enter the circuits of capital. After all, the choice has always been one between socialism or barbarism.

In my recent article published in ROAPE, and now available to access for free, I re-frame the war in Libya by locating it in such a scenario, showing how US-led imperialism underlies the ongoing war and militarism that have contributed to the gradual destruction of the country. Understanding the fate of Libya is crucial to map out the intensifying configuration of circuits of war and capital, as Libya’s fate mirrors the fate of US-led imperialism, thus needs to be understood if we are to chart a different way to imagine, fight and prepare politically for the future.

Trivialising History, Normalising War

The prevailing narrative proposed by policy think tanks argues that since 2011 Libya has become a fertile environment for the development of a pervasive ‘war economy’ dependent on violence, where various armed groups profit from the political turmoil. They present the current situation as an effective prolongation of Qaddafi’s system of patronage and a textbook ‘rentier’ economy, thus Libya’s refusal to embrace liberal ideas and neoliberal economic reforms. As a result, the war is turned into a local, self-inflicted, and cultural/tribal problem. In doing so, liberal political economy not only ends up condoning the logic of capital accumulation driving the US-led imperialist agenda; but—in the process—also rewrites the history of Libya, trivialising its anti-imperialist and progressive past. In such a scenario, war appears as a somewhat natural, if not necessary, outcome for Libya to move to a better developmental stage, while academics keep busy reflecting on the failures of Western ‘good intentions,’ of humanitarian interventions and state-building.

In opposition to this dominant narrative, this blogpost draws on the work of Ali Kadri to re-conceptualise the role of war and militarism as a form of accumulation by waste in the US-led imperialist structure. In doing so, it proposes a novel historicization of the gradual unmaking of the Libyan social formation vis-à-vis the interstate imperialist system from 1969 up to the present.

The Long Hybrid War on Libya

In order to comprehend how Libya reached the current level of destruction, it is crucial to delineate the structural and historical context that functioned as a prelude to the hybrid war unleashed on the country by US-led imperialism since the early 1980s, whose consequences triggered significant socio-economic and political changes and subsequently prompted political conflict in the country.

In 1969, a group of seventy graduates from the armed forces undertook a coup d’etat against the monarchy of King Idris. With this bloodless military operation, whose code-name was ‘Jerusalem’ in honour of the Palestinian cause, Libya embarked toward a path of revolutionary politics at home and abroad.

The Libyan government soon began pursuing a project of national independence that simultaneously advocated for a radical undoing of the relations of domination at the global level. In other words, national liberation required a wider restructuring of the process of unequal exchange and the power hierarchies that allowed the US-led imperialist order to dominate the Global South. By taking seriously into account the anti-imperialist and socialist ideas adopted since the early years of the 1969 revolution (rather than trivializing it, as liberal political economy does), one understands the kernel of the struggle: the Global South’s power to imagine alternative paths to development and regional cooperation by regaining control to shape one’s economy, culture and society. Therefore, numerous political and economic initiatives were undertaken in order to improve the living conditions of the population, including the nationalization of the oil industry in 1973, the construction of infrastructural and redistributive programs, as well as the support of revolutionary movements worldwide (including Palestine, South Africa and Angola), and the pursuit of projects of regional integration. These policies not only translated into a solid popular consensus and widespread support at home, but were also part-and-parcel of a wider post-colonial momentum leading the official call for a New International Economic Order in 1974.

This process of egalitarian development, however, was gradually abandoned in the 1990s. The hybrid war against Libya reached a turning point first with the long military confrontation in Chad; and second with the imposition of international sanctions in 1992. These two key historical moments culminated in a massive military-ideological defeat for the Libyan revolution, whose consequences reverberated across all levels of society. As the Libyan government began to lose its autonomy over economic policies, many members of the state-led capitalist class abandoned their support for anti-imperialist policies and aligned themselves with international dollarised capital. Like many other Arab republics, this shift marked the emergence of a merchant/comprador class, defined by its parasitic relationship to its country and its national resources.

The once nationalist and anti-imperialist elites enriched themselves through rent and commercial activities, systematically transferring their wealth abroad, instead of investing in national or regional enterprises. In such a context of geopolitical uncertainty and constant threat of war, further aggravated by the multi-lateral sanctions that progressively dismantled the infrastructural and redistributive achievements of the past decades, networks of patronage and less democratic structures began to appear. The result of these changes inevitably translated into the emergence of socio-economic inequalities, the mounting use of corruption and political repression (see, for example, the Abu Salim prison massacre), lack of job opportunities and revival of tribal affiliations as both tools of control and valves of a societal safety net.

Therefore, 2011 witnessed a large mass movement of Libyans who angrily protested in the streets, as well as the speedy mobilization of the military power of the US and its NATO allies to direct the course of events. At the same time, one could ask why the so-called ‘international community’ did not allow the reformist wing of the ruling elites, led by Saif al-Islam, to transition Libya into a full market economy, rather than having the country slip into total war.

A Moribund Bully

Since the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab world has been the protagonist in a passage from an equilibrium between economic and military imperialism, where the ideology of economic ‘globalisation’ had the upper hand, to a militaristic and technological form of imperialist expansion, where war and pauperisation are pursued, as in Libya and Syria. Consequently, while I agree with Kadri’s insights that wars respond to a process of accumulation by waste, I further argue in the ROAPE article that these wars are also the result of global contradictions and, particularly, the continuing decline of US imperialist power. This has resulted from the progressive decline of American hegemony in the world due to the worsening of its economy at home, which – in turn – has led to the pursuit and acceptance of ‘unfinished wars’, particularly in the MENA region. These wars are tolerated because they strike a new balance, and they maintain high levels of international competition, allowing many countries to participate while not necessarily dominating, as has happened in Libya.

The corollary for Libya is that its integration into the global economy has also changed. How? Via war, militarism, border missions and the act of killing itself, which have imposed themselves as the new mechanisms of social reproduction and capital accumulation at the global level. In such a scenario, futile are the international actors’ calls for an arms embargo and ceasefires. Why? Because wars and their consequences are becoming the new terrain of social reproduction for an imperial capital that struggles to remain alive. Wars have increasingly become a paradigmatic form of investment opportunity through which the Third World is being framed and integrated into the global economy, where armaments, drones and technological infrastructures of surveillance can be tested, perfected and reused at home.

So, when thinking or approaching the war in Libya, it is important to step back and ponder what function war plays in the global economy. In doing so, the terrain of international class struggle will suddenly switch and inevitably reveal the failure of pseudo-leftist posturing over the next NATO intervention, as it happened in 2011. The imperative is to start drawing clear links between systemic and historical inequality at home and abroad, thus bringing back relentlessly the question of imperialism.

To read Matteo’s full article in ROAPE please open the link here.

Matteo Capasso is a researcher at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence. He is an expert on Libya and has written extensively on the country. Since 2014, he has also been working as an editor of Middle East Critique.

Featured Photograph: Mass demonstration against the regime of Qaddafi in Bayda, Libya (22 July, 2011).

Radical Scepticism: an interview with Jean Copans

ROAPE

September 1, 2020

In an interview with Jean Copans, ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig asks him about a lifetime dedicated to research, activism and writing on Africa. Determined always to carry out serious investigation in his own research, Copans explains we must ensure that our ‘radical’ understanding is not completely divorced from the real world.

Can you please give us a description of your early politicization and work in the 1950s and 1960s?

My parents – an American father and a French mother – had been Communist sympathisers since the 1930s, having met and married in France where my father was studying for a doctorate from Columbia University. They returned to the US on the outbreak of war but after 1945 they finally settled in Paris -my father having landed in Normandy in June 1944, serving with the US Army Office of War Information because of his French language skills. This explains why I was born in New York in 1942. My father went on to work initially for Voice of America, then for French national radio where for a quarter of a century he presented programmes on American music – mostly black music and jazz.[1] We always had plenty of newspapers at home and I followed from afar the wars in Korea and French Indo-China, and the early stages of the Algerian War. In May 1958 I also experienced first-hand, you might say, the coup that brought General de Gaulle to power.

With a view to returning to the US, I started my education at the American School in Paris, before moving for my secondary years to the private École alsacienne. The people and atmosphere there were so bourgeois, with very few gauchistes, that I wanted to attend a regular lycée (and one I believed, wrongly at that time, would be more ‘popular’). So, in the autumn of 1959 I started at the Lycée Condorcet, near the Gare St Lazare. There I met Jeunesse communiste (JC) activists, including their leader, Alain Krivine, who was in my class and became well-known in national politics. Alain and one of his brothers had already joined the Trotskyist Fourth International and were pursuing its familiar tactic of entryism. When we started university at the Sorbonne in 1961, in the Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, we all joined the UEC (Union des étudiants communistes).

During my three years of undergraduate studies (history, geography, ethnology and sociology of sub-Saharan Africa), I spent much of my time campaigning: for an end to the war in Algeria (the ceasefire came in March 1962); against neocolonial interventions in newly independent francophone Africa and the former Belgian Congo (independent since 1960); and lastly, via the very reformist student union UNEF (Union nationale des étudiants de France), for improvements in student conditions.[2]

My activism evolved on several levels, layered one inside another like Russian dolls: the PCF (Parti communiste français), which I subsequently joined for a year in 1964-5; the gauchiste tendency within the UEC; the Fourth International; and from 1961 or 1962 the Pabloite tendency, a splinter group named after the pseudonymous ‘Pablo’ – its Greek founder and leader, Michel Raptis.

The Pabloites adopted a very militant position towards the Third World and its national liberation movements, which I found increasingly attractive as an undergraduate studying these regions. Particularly influential was my Certificate in Human Geography course, which had a strong Third World focus and was taught in part by the geographer Yves Lacoste, author of a title on the Third World for the Que-sais-je? series and husband of the ethnologist and Algerian specialist Colette Lacoste-Dujardin.

Through Alain Krivine and other comrades, I had also become involved in providing clandestine support to the Algerian FLN (Front de libération nationale). This was low-key practical assistance – mainly logistical and financial – and in truth my activities were somewhat limited as my father was still a US citizen. This Pabloite engagement with the FLN explains why my comrades came to play such an active role within post-independence Algeria, remodelling its administration after June 1962. Whatever their precise affiliation, all these militant revolutionaries were known as pieds rouges rather than pieds noirs, the name given to white European settlers in colonial Algeria.

Your first ‘political years’ were spent in the French radical (and Trotskyist) left. You were also inspired by the struggle for national liberation by the Algerian people. Can you speak about your direct experience during this time?

I went to Algeria in July-August 1963 to try and understand what was happening on the ground, but I declined the chance to become a pied rouge. In the months between the ceasefire and the immediate post-independence period of summer 1962, rival FLN factions had engaged in violent ‘military’ clashes, raising doubts in my mind that were only confirmed by my visit. Victory went to the Ben Bella clan, which had long enjoyed Pabloite support for its programme of socialist self-management (the programme that had prompted the Pabloite split with the Fourth International which remained very statist and Leninist). I turned down the offer of a teaching post at the University of Algiers – partly for the reasons given above, but also because I then had only two of the four certificates needed for my degree. Ten years later I made a similar decision in refusing to go and teach at the University of Maputo after the liberation of Mozambique – a state that was clearly part of the socialist bloc and ultra-Stalinist in its administration and ideology (an analysis amply confirmed by my subsequent visit in 1983).

Late 1963 thus saw the end of my period of intense political militancy and the start of my professional career in African studies, ethnology and sociology. I read the works of Georges Balandier, who encouraged me to study for a doctorate under his supervision and in January 1965 appointed me as secretary of his political anthropology research group. Perhaps I should add that on 24 December 1964 I had married a secondary-school teacher who did not work in Paris, which brought some changes to my lifestyle and routines. Through my contacts with fellow researchers – Marxist and non-Marxist! – my engagement subsequently became more intellectual and ideological.

From 1959 onwards I was reading most of the French communist and Marxist journals and frequenting the bookshops that stocked this literature. I was also a regular at the Salons du livre Marxiste – book fairs that were then pretty popular and well attended. The late 1950s and 1960s saw powerful movements of internal criticism growing within the PCF and its academic and trade union affiliates. My new life as a militant intellectual also became public at this time, as in December 1964 when I published my first paper – an extended discussion of two monographs on social class in sub-Saharan Africa, by Jean Ziegler and Raymond Barbé respectively. The paper appeared in Sous le drapeau du socialisme, the new monthly journal of the AMR (Alliance marxiste révolutionnaire), the official title of the [Pabloite] splinter group described above. By then I had been working on AMR publications, in practical and editorial roles, for at least two years. I had discovered my passion for writing and the critique of ideas, and also for the real world of publishing and even printing (in the days of linotype).

How did you move from these interests into research on Senegal? What explains the ‘emergence’ of these interests and how were they tied to your activism on the left?

In the 1960s the research interests of French Africanists (in ethnology, anthropology and sociology) reflected Anglo-American trends in these disciplines, and the majority of our reading was in English. Contemporary undergraduates and doctoral students had greater expertise in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya or southern Africa than in Côte d’Ivoire or Senegal. In the 1950s French Africanists had really only just begun breaking ground, which is why in 1965 I had neither a field nor a domain for my doctoral research project. The Centre d’études africaines was based at the EPHE (École pratique des hautes études) VIe Section, which in 1974 became the EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociale). There the leading lights were Georges Balandier and Paul Mercier, whose main preoccupations centred on social and cultural change, the political anthropology of Africa (traditional, modern and post-colonial), under-development and current development initiatives.

In late 1965 I spent three months in Côte d’Ivoire, working on an applied social science project for a private research organisation. I was investigating agricultural modernisation initiatives in the peri-urban zone of Abidjan, a topic in line with the dominant theme of contemporary Africanist research – understanding rural societies and the modernisation of the peasant farmers who would be vital to the economic take-off of the new nations. There followed several twists and turns in my professional and personal life before I Ieft for Senegal in January 1967. Among these was my son’s birth in December 1966, which delayed my family posting. My mission came under the auspices of ORSTOM (Office de la recherche scientifique et technique outre-mer) – now the IRD (Institut de recherche pour le développement) – a national research organisation founded in colonial days (1943) and active throughout the former French territories worldwide. I had gone to study social stratification in the Mouride Brotherhood, a Sufi confraternity deemed to be hierarchical and perhaps totalitarian in structure – happily a hypothesis that turned out to be completely false!

My move into research was not accompanied by any militant engagement in support of the revolutionary struggles ongoing in Africa in the late 1960s. Several factors were in play here. The intense mobilisation provoked by the Algerian War had not prompted a similar degree of activism in support of newly independent Algeria. Elsewhere in francophone Africa, in countries by then independent for several years, the erstwhile nationalist reform movements that came to power had been co-opted immediately by the French authorities and lost all potential for radical action. The only exception was Guinea, which, despite its geopolitical alignments, had become a dictatorship and was thus socialist in name only. Movements in non-francophone Africa were ‘off-limits’ to French militants who lacked any contacts there. Finally, the focus of the ideological, political and theoretical debates that sprang up around Marxism’s new directions were anti-Stalinism, Sino-Soviet confrontation and the ‘romantic’ opening-up of Cuba. My activism thus became more academic and conceptual, yet at the same time more empirical and practical: how are we to discern the process of class struggle in societies of which we know almost nothing? What do we need to think and do? How are we to conduct the essential fieldwork? And the result was an attitude of radical skepticism towards dogmatic assertions of the theoretical benefits of Marxism, totally at odds with the so-called revolutionary realities of the new Third World nations.

You were researching social and economic change in Senegal in the late 1960s, specifically the Mouride brotherhood. There are a few of questions here. Can you describe life in Senegal (a relatively newly independent country) while you were there? Could you also speak of your impressions of the immense uprising in the country in 1968 and its consequences? What was your direct involvement?

Influenced by my reading, education and early fieldwork, as well as by experienced researchers like Jean Suret-Canale, Maurice Godelier, and especially Claude Meillassoux, I began to rethink the anthropology of pre-capitalist societies, the nature of post-colonial capitalism, and especially the structure of the new ‘nations’ and neocolonial states – social groups, modes of production etc. I believed it absolutely essential to clarify our understanding of these areas before devising any kind of political programme. The extreme numerical and sociological weakness of the working classes, the absence of private agricultural landowners – these were vital characteristics that demanded investigation before committing any serious militant support to parties or groups whose boasted radicalism seemed completely divorced from the real world.

Late 1960s Senegal was still a very colonial society, with a large French administrative and military presence at least 30,000 strong and an export-oriented economy dominated by a groundnut sector in the midst of technological modernisation while remaining within an ostensibly socialist system of cooperatives, rural development and so on! My study of the Mouride Brotherhood prompted me to question the existing Third-Worldist (René Dumont) or Marxist (Samir Amin) approaches, which failed to distinguish between different levels of national political control, market-driven economic exploitation, and religious and ideological submission to religious leaders or marabouts.

While May ’68 in Senegal had some strictly local roots, others were in a sense pan-African through the University of Dakar’s multinational recruitment policy. I was involved very indirectly in these events through contacts of my wife, who was enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and Languages at the university (where in 1968 the teaching staff was still all white) and was the only one of the white (French and Lebanese) students to go on strike. I believe there were 5,000 students in all at the time. Of course, I met some of these militants, whose programme combined extreme corporatism (in favour of higher grants) with a highly abstract anti-imperialism. We were careful, nonetheless. At the request of President Senghor, France had repatriated two professors of sociology – Louis-Vincent Thomas, the Head of Faculty, and Jacques Lombard – whose only crime had been to defend their students against violent state repression. By contrast, because I had a reputation as a gauchiste militant, my ORSTOM colleagues came to ask me about the potential impact of May ’68 in France – a May ’68 whose roots I did not fully understand after eighteen months away.

Can you discuss what you did after you returned to France after your period in West Africa? How did your work develop during that period and what was the influence/involvement in France and Africa?

A year after I returned to France in 1970, I secured a post as a tenured research fellow and immediately expanded my politico-professional activities. I popularised the ‘Anthropology, Colonialism and Imperialism’ debate, started in the US by Kathleen Gough and fellow anthropologists, particularly in the pages of Current Anthropology. I edited dossiers for the journal Les Temps modernes, followed by a substantial anthology for François Maspero, the radical gauchiste and Third-Worldist publisher. In 1973 I defended my doctoral thesis from a Marxist perspective, in line with current debates in French Marxist anthropology. Teaching at the EHESS, I also became a very militant trade unionist, leaving the ultra-Stalinist and PCF-controlled SNESUP (Syndicat nationale de l’enseignement supérieur) and joining the SGEN (Syndicat général de l’éducation nationale), which was aligned with the CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail) and espoused a reformist Christian left ideology that was shared by three-quarters of the unionised staff. As an aside: the highly corporatist Communist-leaning labour unions were seeking revenge on the left of May ’68, detesting the wholly exceptional solidarity displayed by the EPHE-EHESS staff. In effect, doctoral students, administrative and technical staff, ‘junior faculty’, directors and professors had all combined to form a single labour union, thereby calling into question the legitimacy and authority of PCF-appointed union bureaucracies. This type of vertically integrated unionism lasted throughout the 1970s, and as a result I led delegations and negotiated with individuals like Fernand Braudel and François Furet, who disagreed profoundly with the staff yet respected us absolutely.

The 1970s were the years of the first great West African droughts, leading to significant urban migration and the onset of famine. In 1973 a group of colleagues signed a petition denouncing France’s neocolonial policies, which were aggravating the situation, and established a Comité Information Sahel (of which I was treasurer). Over the next two years the Comité maintained a high public profile: in 1974 Claude Meillassoux and I edited anonymously Qui se nourrit de la famine au Sahel?, a highly critical work published by Éditions Maspero, while in June 1975 a day of protest in the Bois de Vincennes attracted at least 3,000 people. The book went into a second edition, selling 15,000 copies in two years! Reprisals followed, more or less overt, and unlike other colleagues I received no promotion for the next two years. Alongside the book for the Comité, however, I had also edited a two-volume work for Dossiers africains, a popularising series published by François Maspero and co-directed by Marc Augé and myself. This work, Sécheresses et famines du Sahel, was much more academic in tone and enabled me to expand my contacts among British and American Africanists mobilised by the same topic, especially with regard to northern Nigeria and the Horn of Africa.

This international collaboration was extremely productive, so much so that by accident I became the ‘Mr Famine’ of the French Sahel. While I was working at Johns Hopkins University in 1975-6, I was visited in my office by medical scientists engaged in nutritional research, and I also conducted an active correspondence with British and Canadian anthropologists. I published half a dozen articles or notes in English at a time when, apart from the academics mobilised by the Comité, French institutions and research groups seemed indifferent to the crisis. This apathy confirmed my enduring belief in the need for anthropological and political activism, albeit an activism more analytical in character than ideological or organisational. I would add also that the book’s most active promoters were Catholic associations and NGOs like the CCFD (Comité catholique contre la faim et pour le développement).

The late 1970s saw two further engagements on my part: the first was the study of Africa’s working classes, where for twenty-five years I became the French specialist, again as part of a group of international collaborators – Canadian, American, British, Dutch and African (particularly South African). It was Peter Gutkind who first involved me in this venture in 1975 following our debates in the pages of Cahiers d’études africaines, and I also was engaged with the Canadian journal Labour, Capital and Society with Robin Cohen, Peter Waterman and Edward Webster. For over a decade, ORSTOM hosted a very active research group, my EHESS seminar became the centre for internationalist studies, and a Newsletter was launched which led to the publication of several titles between 1987 and 1997. I published an article in 2014 that explored the reasons underlying this success and its subsequent demise around the turn of the century. In the past year, however, I have noted a revival of interest among a new generation of French Africanists. I have played no part in this new ideological and militant mobilisation but its motivations clearly differs from those of its predecessor thirty years ago.

The second was African political studies, in anthropology as well as political science per se. This was the movement embodied in the journal Politique africaine, which I helped to found in 1980. I also served as a director in 1983-5, before leaving to spend four years in Kenya. I worked very closely with Jean-Franc̜ois Bayart, then known only for his ‘politics from below’, the theory that transformed leftist and also Marxist analysis – initially of state machines and modes of political control, and subsequently of the underlying meanings of popular social movements. Despite all these academic and editorial engagements, my links with African militants – union officials or political activists – have been very few. I limited my contact because nearly all these individuals were assimilated within state or institutional hierarchies, prompting an enduring mistrust on my part. This was true in Senegal but also in Mozambique, where I had several introductions from students or from AMR contacts like Aquino de Bragança, the adviser of Samora Machel. I should emphasise, however, that as a doctoral supervisor, unofficially at the EHESS from 1977 and officially at the University of Picardy (Amiens) from 1990, I have had only one or two African students researching the working classes – tangible proof of the sharp decline in working-class activism since the 1980s.

ROAPE was born from the struggles of a second wave of independence in the 1970s, mostly in Portugal’s ex-colonies, and the hopes of a generation in a more critical and Marxist-inspired independence, leading to a transition to socialism. Where you similarly influenced by these movements-specifically in Tanzania and Mozambique?

I took a very critical view of Portugal’s ex-colonies, despite my contacts with students from these countries and my interests in Africa as a whole, not just its francophone nations. I even published an article, later translated into English, proposing the hypothesis that the old socialist states and Africa’s young Marxist-Leninist states shared a number of similarities in sociological terms. In the case of Tanzania, I knew enough of the researchers published in ROAPE to recognise the need to differentiate between the ideas of its leaders, the prevailing political ideologies, and the everyday workings of African bureaucracies. A first visit to these countries in 1983, before my longer stay in East Africa, confirmed me in my views. In fact, from the late 1970s, it was South Africa and the different anti-apartheid movements that mobilised me in particular. I had some collected papers by Mike Morris, Harold Wolpe and Martin Legassick translated into French and published by François Maspero, but to my regret this evoked no response among French Africanists, nor more generally among Marxist economists specialising in the Third World. When Eddie Webster invited me to defy the boycott and travel to Cape Town for the congress of South African sociologists in 1985, it was 100 per cent Marxist!

My engagement with South Africa took several forms: leading a CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) research group (in succession to Claude Meillassoux) in the 1990s; co-directing an EHESS seminar on southern Africa for twenty years; and in the mid-1990s, helping to establish the Institut français d’Afrique du Sud (IFAS) for research in the social sciences (modelled on identical bodies in Nairobi, which I ran, Ibadan and Addis Ababa, to mention sub-Saharan Africa alone). Yet these initiatives enjoyed only moderate success in mobilising French academics who continue to prioritise the countries of francophone Africa. We can debate how far such institutional and administrative engagement is truly activist and militant, but I have always felt that concrete action is required to extend the professional Africanist culture of my students and colleagues, all too often reluctant to stray beyond ‘their own backyard’. African students in particular are more tightly bound than most by a methodological nationalism with deep roots in the colonial past.

For further information on Jean Copans’ work and publications, see his articles in ROAPE and particularly the most recent issue. See also a long filmed interview, directed by Frédéric Laugrand for the series Les Possédés et leurs mondes, which explores in greater detail most of the issues cited here (divided into ten separate episodes)

Jean Copans is an Africanist anthropologist, who specializes on Senegal, the social sciences of development and the history and methods of anthropology and sociology. He is a long-standing comrade and collaborator of ROAPE and a member of our International Advisory Board.

This interview was conducted in Dakar, Senegal on 3 November 2019 and translated by Maggie Sumner.

Notes

[1] See Un amour (Les Films d’Ici, 90 mins, 2014) – the very personal film made by my producer/director brother Richard Copans about our parents, in which I do not entirely recognise myself. See also the Wikipedia article on Sim Copans.

[2] The UNEF later helped to spearhead May ’68, but I was not involved as I had been in Senegal since January 1967 conducting my anthropological fieldwork.

Walter Rodney’s Legacy

ROAPE

August 31, 2020

Walter Rodney was a revolutionary and scholar. He wrote some of the most astonishing books of the second half of the 20^th century on development, history, slavery and politics in Africa and the Third World. His 1972 classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa influenced generations of radical scholars, and had a lastly impact on research and activism.

Rodney was born in British occupied Guyana in 1942. Identified early on as a remarkable student, he continued his studies in Jamaica, and then moved to the UK to study for a PhD in history at SOAS in 1963. In London he met the Caribbean Marxist C L R James, who became a lifelong friend and comrade.

Rodney moved to Tanzania in 1966 to work at the University of Dar es Salaam which was established in 1961. As a salaried historian Rodney worked in the exciting atmosphere of a country that was determined to break from its colonial past and chart a socialist path to development. Rodney threw himself into Tanzania’s political debates on socialist change, while continuing to work on vital aspects of Africa’s colonial history.

In 1974, Rodney moved with his family back to Guyana, originally to take up a position at the national university as professor of history. A well-known opponent of the regime in Guyana, Rodney’s appointment was opposed by the government – specifically the Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham. By the time Rodney arrived in the capital Georgetown, the position had been rescinded.

Rodney entered a period of intense of political work as a leading member of the radical organisation, the Working People’s Alliance. He also continued to lecture and research around the world, in America, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa. As a party organiser, Rodney politicised workers in the country and fought for unity between the country’s Indian and African communities. Mass opposition to Burnham’s US backed regime was growing, and Rodney was on the front-line of the movement.

Determined to break the movement and aware of the key role that Rodney played in the opposition, the government arrange for him to be murdered. On 13 June 1980 a bomb, planted in a walkie-talkie, killed Walter Rodney. He was 38 years old.

Rodney’s influence – his legacy – on radical political economy and history, on subjects that continue to be central to the Review of African Political Economy, is immense. Renewed interest in Rodney’s life has received fresh stimulus with the republication by Verso of a number of his books, and a new, posthumous volume of his work on the Russian revolution. To mark the continued vibrancy of his ideas and contribution, roape.net is hosting an on-going debate on Walter Rodney’s legacy, which can be accessed here.

We invite our readers to contribute to the discussion, read Rodney’s work, and debate the continued significance of his ideas.

The photo is of MAO (Movement Against Oppression) members, Joey Garroway, Brian Rodway (artist and Rodneyite), ‘Brains’ (only name available), ‘German’ and Sam, taken around 1971, three years before Walter came back to Guyana in 1974. ‘German’ was the popular name for Hubert Urling now deceased. Walter later worked with MAO as a radical grass-roots movement in ‘Tiger Bay’ – the same area where the WPA started. We are grateful to Donald Rodney for clarifying this information.

Reframing Politics – the multiple crises of our age

ROAPE

July 31, 2020

ROAPE believes that our times are radical, and we need to radicalise with them in theory and practice – we have been attempting to do this. We inform our readers and supporters that in order to return revived and refreshed to the struggles we have been covering, ROAPE will be pausing activities in August on journal production and the website and social media.

For all of us, the last few months have been extraordinarily intense. The crisis of Covid-19 and the devastation it has caused to human life is linked, as we wrote in March, to capital accumulation: ‘We must also see the increase in the rates of viruses as intimately connected to food production and the profit margins of international businesses.’

Yet, as we know, the crisis has not fallen evenly on the rich and poor – the absurd idea that ‘we are all in this together’ is no longer even repeated by the right-wing press. Poor, working-class and BAME communities (in the UK, where this is being written) have been ferociously and disproportionally targeted by the virus. Around the world it has been the poor who have been killed in their thousands.

Yet there has been an astonishing and connected riposte. The global protests linked to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by the police on 25 May has been astonishing and promises to re-establish the parameters of radical change around the world. The New York Times reported that on 6 June, people turned out in nearly 550 places across the country to protests. In early July up to 26 million people had participated in demonstrations in the US. These statistics prove that the recent action has been the largest protest movement in the history of the country.

ROAPE’s Hakim Adi, in a recent webinar hosted by ROAPE (together with the Walter Rodney Foundation and others) stated that there had been ‘260 protests’ in villages, towns and cities around the UK since the murder of George Floyd. In other countries across the world the figures have been as impressive.

Today, in the context of multiple, connected movements and anti-racist struggles, and the urgent search for an alternative to capitalism, ROAPE has attempted to keep up. We have published blogposts on the pandemic (and its underlying causes) on the continent, invited activists to write and inform us about the ‘crackdown’ that has followed Covid-19 and how it has impacted communities and activist groups. We have also held a number of webinars on the pandemic across Africa, on the progress of Sudan’s revolution, surveillance and digitisation in the context of Covid-19 and on slavery, colonialism and Black Lives Matter.

We believe that the Black Lives Matter movement and the ideas around it are reframing politics, similar to the period around 1968. There is a huge political and ideological crisis amidst the historical disasters of the pandemic, the economy, and the climate emergency. Our times are radical, and we need to radicalise with them in theory and practice. ROAPE is attempting to do this (see Tunde Zack-Williams’ recent blogpost on BLM movement and radical African studies here).

So that we can rest, to then return revived and refreshed to these struggles in September, the website is entering a short period of hibernation. As we stated last year, ‘Over the last forty years, during what David Harvey has termed the “neoliberal counter-revolution”, ROAPE has sought to analyse these processes and trends across Africa. Deepening capitalist penetration in the economies and societies on the continent, and the expansion of a neoliberal “new economy”, has been the target of our politics and interventions. The impact of the renewed offensive on the “working day” has been devastating for labouring classes in both the Global South and the Global North.

‘The academic and research world has followed the pack. Across all areas of work, we now accept as normal that we are available around the clock, to answer emails – on our phones or computers – at all hours, and in all circumstances. New technologies and social media – potentially means for improving the quality of our lives – enable, as Marx wrote in the 1860s, the expansion of our exploitation and labour.’

This will mean that roape.net and social media will not be emailing, posting, tweeting or updating for a few weeks. Review of new and revised manuscripts will be paused, and only those papers already accepted, and the imminent issue, will have their journey to online publication brought to completion during this period. However, we will be back to continue our coverage of the multiple crises of our age, and the epoch-defining protests and struggles of contemporary capitalism.

Editorial Working Group

Featured Photograph: A Black Lives Matter demonstration organised by the Left-Green Youth in Bad Mergentheim, Germany (6 June 2020).

The Rise of Black Lives Matter Movement

ROAPE

July 29, 2020

The Rise of Black Lives Matter Movement: Some Lessons for the (Africanist) Left

ROAPE’s Tunde Zack-Williams discusses the extraordinary Black Lives Matter movement in the context of African studies and the radical left. For those of us who work, research and study in the narrow discipline of ‘African studies’, including in ROAPE, we need to break down the disciplinary barriers between continents and people – we make a number of relevant key texts from our archive available below the blogpost.

By Tunde Zack-Williams

In an article published in ROAPE in 1995 entitled, ‘African Development and African Diaspora: Separate Concerns’? I questioned the disciplinary gulf between development studies, which had almost completely ignored questions of race and cultural identity, on the one hand, and diasporic studies which tend to focus on cultural and racial links with Africa to the exclusion of questions of political economy. The article was also critical of perspectives which ignored the heterogeneity and variety of African cultures and experiences, whether for purposes of creating a caricatured colonial subject or for asserting an undifferentiated unity between Africans on the continent and those in the diaspora. I argued for an understanding of both the uniqueness and the commonality of African experiences on both sides of the Atlantic. I also called for an overdue dialogue between the concerns of African diasporic cultural studies and those of development theory in Africa itself.[1]

In what follows, I want to draw attention to the fact that attempts to come to terms with contemporary African dynamics, away from African diasporas, is actually counter-productive, if we want to understand how the diasporas work and how they yearn for ‘the home land’. Already, there is evidence of the vital role of remittances in African economic activities. In many African countries, remittances play a crucial role in government expenditure, as well as providing a catalyst for financial markets and the monetary policies of many governments, by removing credit constraints on the poor and improving the allocation of capital. The remittances transferred by migrant workers constitute a major source of foreign exchange for governments and relief for relatives who are often non-earners.

Yet, African studies in Britain, for example, continues to be insulated from diasporan concerns, reflecting the contrasting histories of both disciplines. Remittances are not the only contributions that diasporan Africans make to the development of the African continent. Whilst issues of class, gender, and regional inequality have informed debates and policies on development, as a rule development studies has carefully avoided a direct focus on ‘race’ and racism (with few exceptions). Instead, it has focused spatially in an unproblematic way on nation states, thought to be ‘developing’ or ‘undeveloping.’

To exacerbate the situation, the link between the historical legacy of colonialism and the condition of the black diaspora was soon abandoned by those who inherited the mantle of the discipline of the sociology of race relations- a potential locus of the study of diasporan concerns. Nonetheless, there was a common thread running through these two disciplines: the ‘universalist quest’. In the case of the new sociology of race relations it was premised on ‘assimilation’ and adjustment within black communities; in the case of development studies it was premised on a unilinear path to modernisation, i.e. Westernisation. Now, central to the analysis of both disciplines is the role of migration: internal rural-urban migration in one, and international migration in the other. It is the new sociology of race relations which borrowed from development studies its key theoretical tools for explaining migration, namely the push-pull, and bright light theories. These were soon incorporated into the explanatory paradigm of black migration to the metropolis. However, in plainer language Ambalavaner Sivanandan warned that concepts such as push–pull factors tell us very little since they do not take a holistic view of the world economy. Furthermore, he pointed out: ‘we (black people) are here because you (colonialists) were over there (in the colonies) first’.[2]

Now, Sivanandan, who was born in Sri Lanka, was a leading figure in the anti-racist struggle in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s and always described himself as Black. He related the above statement in a lecture, when he explained that this reply was by ‘an Asian’ worker, who was asked ‘why he chose to come to Britain?’ The respondent then replied: ‘Please Sir, because you (Britain) were over there first (in Pakistan as the colonial power) that’s why we are now here’. He described himself and his heritage as black, a nomenclature that can no longer be used to describe an Asian comrade in an anti-racist struggle, due to what Tariq Modood has referred to ‘political blackness’, i.e describing an Asia comrade as black, when indeed, the form of address was designed to define people of African heritage.[3] This idea of political blackness Modood argued had ‘provided activists and thinkers with a new way of understanding and organising around the notion of shared, non-white experience, identity and politics.’ This strategy had been used by other scholars and activists, such as Stuart Hall, Salman Rushdie and the Southhall Black Sisters.

One wonders how this changing position would have impacted on workers’ solidarity on the shop floor. Would the famous Grunwick strike of 1976-78 over trade union recognition have secured such solidarity of workers and activists? This strike, which was one of the longest industrial disputes at the time, was fought by women strikers, who were supported by large sections of the trade union movement. The dispute cannot be dissociated from the broad front of support by other trade unionists, other workers, students and the local communities the women came from.

One effect of the success of the changes discussed by Modood was to put a dampener on workers’ solidarity in the face of growing attacks on wages and the right to strike with the strong anti-trade union legislation of the Thatcher government (coming to power in May 1979) aiming to put an end to ‘Wild Cat Strikes’. For the working class, the industrial schism following the end of what Modood called ‘political blackness,’ was to weaken solidarity, with the result that groups and individuals can be easily dealt with by agents of the oppressive state apparatus. It is clear that colonialism was built on stereotypes of the ‘native’ and the African experience was the most pernicious. Presumably, this is why many took offense to the ‘B’ word (for ‘their’ people), which presumably was associated with the ‘N’ word – who would not want to extricate a people from such insolence?

However, most Black people remain voiceless, with their daily lives riddled with stereotypes, innuendos and ridicules – ‘we who have invented nothing’, as Aimé Césaire sarcastically put it. It is this kind of harassment Black people face in Britain and in the US, as Afua Hirsch has pointed out in The Guardian, ‘the racism that killed George Floyd was built in Britain’. As she observed, ‘what black people are experiencing the world over is a system that finds their bodies expendable by design’. She continues: ‘African Americans told us this when they lost Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Chinedu Okobi, Michael Brown, Aiyana Jones, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis, Alton Sterling, Philando Catile and so many more’. Quoting the great Maya Angelou, Hirsch pointed out that: ‘…blacks have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.’ Now, this is not a case of ‘Yankee exceptionalism’, for as The Guardian noted, ‘the UK is not innocent’: Jimmy Mubenga, according to the same newspaper, died when he was pinned to the ground by a security guard trying to deport him in October 2010. He has not been the only victim of this kind of homicide in the hands of agents of the state who should have protected them from harm. Other victims include, to name as few, Aseta Simms, Christopher Adler, Sheku Bayoh, Sean Rigg, and Mark Duggan.

The most recent assault on the African community was the Tory government’s decision to deport some members of the African-Caribbean community (known as the Windrush generation) who could not produce valid documents to certify their right to live in Britain. Since most of these people had lived in the country for more than 50 years, many could not locate their documents to justify their right to be in the country, and they were deported to countries not visited in decades, causing them serious social and financial disruption.

The death of George Floyd at the hands of three Minneapolis Police officers who pinned him down on the ground with a knee on his neck for almost nine minutes outraged many people in Britain of all ethnic groups. For members of the Black community, Floyd’s death reminded them of similar experiences with their encounter with the police in the UK.

BLM is an international human rights movement originating from within the black community in the US through campaigning against violence, racial profiling, police brutality and racial inequalities in the criminal justice system towards Black people. BLM, which is opened to all races and is Black-led consists of over 150 organisations and is also active in the US elections and in ensuring that the family of George Floyd receive their just due. The clarion call of the organisation is to build a country (and indeed a world) where Black peoples’ lives matter in every aspect of society, including the workplace just like any other group. For those of us who work, research and study in the narrow discipline of ‘African studies’, including in ROAPE, we need to break down the disciplinary barriers between continents and people as urgently as ‘decolonising’ the curriculum.

Black Lives Matter! Let’s say it aloud!

Tunde Zack-Williams is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Central Lancashire. His books include Tributors, Supporters and Merchant Capital: Mining & Underdevelopment in Sierra Leone (1995); The Quest for Sustainable Peace: The 2007 Sierra Leone Elections (2008); Africa Beyond the Post-Colonial: Politics & Socio-Cultural Identities (with Ola Uduku) (2004); Africa in Crisis: New Challenges & Possibilities (2002). He is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy.

Further reading on Black Consciousness in South Africa; African studies and the diaspora; Karl Marx’s debt to people of African descent in Capital from ROAPE’s archive (free access to the full articles):

Biko Agozino (2014) ‘The Africana paradigm in Capital: the debts of Karl Marx to people of African descent’, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 41, 2014 – Issue 140.

Alfred Zack-Williams (1995) ‘Development and Diaspora: Separate Concerns?’, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 22, 1995 – Issue 65.

Archie Mafeje (1978) ‘Soweto and its aftermath’, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 5, 1978 – Issue 11.

Ruth First (1978) ‘After Soweto: a response’, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 5, 1978 -Issue 11.

L. Mqotsi (1979) ‘After Soweto: another response’, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 6, 1979 – Issue 14.

Featured Photograph: Black Lives Matter mural being painted on a street of Charlotte, North Carolina (9 June 2020).

Notes

[1] See Zack-Williams, A. (1995), ‘Development and Diaspora: Separate Concerns? ROAPE, 1995, No.65:349-358, 1995, for an attempt to address these concerns. See also S. Howe, Afrocentricism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, Verso, London & New York, 1998.

[2] Sivanandan, A. (1991) Setting the Context for Change, Curriculum Development Project Steering Group, Council of Social Work Education, London.

[3] T. Modood, ‘Inequality, Identity, Belonging,’ Conference Briefing, 1-2 November 2018

African Cities: capitalism’s urban frontier

ROAPE

July 23, 2020

Discussing Africa’s relationship to global real estate capital, Tom Gillespie argues that we should not see African cities as exceptional to wider processes of accumulation and circulation but explore what we can learn about 21st century capitalism by studying its urban frontiers.

By Tom Gillespie

Africa is urbanizing rapidly and African cities are amongst the fastest growing in the world. Dramatic economic growth, rapid urbanization and an emerging middle class have generated growing optimism about Africa’s development prospects in the 21st century. Accompanying this optimism, many large African cities are being transformed beyond recognition by growing investment in real estate. Major economic hubs such as Accra, Lagos and Nairobi are witnessing a proliferation of new construction projects such as luxury apartment blocks, shopping malls and satellite cities. These transformations raise important questions about Africa’s relationship to global flows of real estate capital.

Africa has historically been excluded from global flows of real estate investment due to the perceived risks of investing on the continent, including widespread informality, ‘opaque’ market conditions and complex land tenure systems. This has led Tom Goodfellow to argue in ROAPE that real estate investment in Africa is dominated by domestic capital and the diaspora, and that the concept of ‘financialisation’ has limited relevance for understanding the transformation of the built environment in African cities.

While it is true that the financialisation of real estate in Africa has been limited to date, the perception that the continent is ‘rising’ has led it to be promoted as a ‘new frontier’ for global real estate capital. This frontier discourse, evident in the publications of global real estate agents, combines fears of risk and uncertainty with promises of opportunity for daring investors.

The establishment of several Sub-Saharan Africa-focused real estate funds, such as the London-based investment firm Actis, indicates that global investors have begun to take the continent seriously. Rendeavour, part of Russia’s Renaissance Group, is building new satellite cities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Zambia. These self-contained private cities are often imagined as ‘eco’, ‘smart’ and ‘world class’ utopias that will enable global competitiveness for African economies. In addition, development finance institutions such as the UK’s CDC Group are investing in urban real estate projects in a number of African countries.

Despite limited financialisation to date, therefore, there are now deliberate efforts on the part of financial actors to integrate the continent more fully into global flows of real estate capital. Indeed, it is Africa’s peripheral position in relation to global real estate markets that enables it to be promoted as an exciting new ‘frontier’ for investment.

Various researchers have employed the concept of the frontier to think critically about the relationship between capitalism and its outsides. Amongst these, geographers Seth Schindler and Miguel Kanai and have drawn on Jason Moore’s research on ‘commodity frontiers’ to analyse capitalist expansion at the urban scale in Latin America and South Asia. According to Moore, a commodity frontier is a zone into which capital can expand through the violent appropriation of uncommodified resources. My recent research on urban redevelopment in Accra builds on this approach by exploring how state actors have sought to attract real estate investment through the commodification of state-owned land in Ghana’s capital. In the process, these actors produce an urban commodity frontier, what I call a ‘real estate frontier’, characterised by the transformation of state land into real estate.

The production of a real estate frontier is an attempt to overcome the limits to capitalist expansion posed by widespread customary land tenure in Accra. Disputes over ownership in the customary land sector have historically acted as a deterrent to real estate investment in the city. State actors have sought to overcome this limit and attract investment by providing access to litigation-free state land for development. In the words of one senior official from the Ghana Tourist Development Company, ‘our job is that once we have found an investor, we take away that headache of the investor going to find land (so they) don’t need to themselves hassle with traditional authorities.’

This approach has resulted in hundreds of acres of state land in Accra being allocated to private developers since the 1990s. The beneficiaries are typically local elites with government connections who have subsequently built large numbers of luxury apartments and villas in the central urban areas (or sold the land to others who did). This echoes Goodfellow’s findings about the influence of clientalism in shaping the built environment in Addis Ababa, Kampala and Kigali. In some cases, these local developers have partnered with international investors. For example, Actis are financing the construction of a luxury mixed-use enclave adjacent to the airport in partnership with a local developer. These high value properties are beyond the means of the majority of Ghanaians and are often leased by global corporations to accommodate their employees.

The government has also recently embarked on project to redevelop Accra’s waterfront into a spectacular tourism and leisure enclave in partnership with both local and international investors and architects, including London-based British-Ghanaian architect Sir David Adjaye. As such, the commodification of state land has enabled the real estate frontier to advance through the incorporation of new urban spaces into global circuits of real estate capital and planning expertise.

State actors justify the production of this real estate frontier in terms of increasing housing supply, improving the city’s tourist infrastructure, beautifying the urban landscape and creating growth and jobs that will benefit all city-dwellers. In addition, they argue that the lands in question are in need of redevelopment as they are underutilised and degraded. However, land privatisation has provided cover for the grabbing of high value state lands by elites, depriving the public of revenue in the process. In addition, shack dwellers on Accra’s waterfront were evicted without compensation in September 2014. Although a cholera outbreak was used to justify the eviction on public health grounds, housing activists and academics have argued that clearing the land for the waterfront redevelopment project was the primary motivation for the demolition exercise. As a result, various civil society groups have contested the processes of land grabbing and dispossession that accompany the expansion of Accra’s real estate frontier.

Despite efforts to produce a real estate frontier in Accra, Ghana’s post-2015 economic slump has led to falling demand for high-end apartments, offices and retail space. As a result, industry professionals lament an excess of luxury properties on the market, many of which remain empty (a phenomenon that has also been identified in global cities such as London). As such, Accra is characterised by an oversupply of luxury real estate in the context of an affordable housing shortage.

This unequal urban geography will shape the impacts of Covid-19: while spacious luxury apartments sit vacant, the virus is likely to spread rapidly in overcrowded low-income settlements where social distancing is difficult, access to clean water for hand washing is limited, and informal workers face a stark choice between staying at home and eating. As such, the pandemic has made more urgent than ever the need to address the extreme inequalities that characterise African cities and have been exacerbated by the commodification of urban space.

Although Africa has been, to date, largely peripheral to global flows of real estate capital, this does not mean that capitalism is absent from, or irrelevant to, African urban transformations. While I agree with Goodfellow’s assessment that domestic capital dominates real estate investment in African cities, the case of Accra’s demonstrates that a range of local and transnational actors (from state agencies to local developers to international investors) have actively sought to incorporate this peripheral city into global real estate markets, transforming its urban geography in the process. Rather than viewing African cities as exceptional to wider processes of accumulation and circulation, therefore, it is important to explore what we can learn about 21st century capitalism and its expansionary dynamics by studying its urban frontiers.

Tom Gillespie is the Hallsworth Research Fellow, Global Development Institute and Manchester Urban Institute, University of Manchester.

Featured Photograph: A skyscraper, 35 Lower Long, recently built in Cape Town (19 September 2019).

The Lionel Cliffe Memorial Research Scholarship for 2020

ROAPE

July 21, 2020

The Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) announces the winners of a small research grants competition for African researchers and activists based in Africa. The competition is based on the premise that a shortage of funding for critical research is one of the problems faced by Africa-based scholars and activists wishing to carry forward a political economy agenda.

Among the dozens of applicants two women whose activist profile and research proposals showed clear potential to lead to manuscript submissions to ROAPE. These candidates were selected because their proposals were the strongest and they fulfilled all the criteria of the scholarship. Incidentally, both of the candidates made contact with ROAPE through the Connections Workshops, and are now being supervised by ROAPE’s contributing editor Kate Alexander.

Angela Chukunzira is one of the winners of the scholarship. Angela is a young Kenyan activist who has enrolled in a MA programme in Johannesburg after having contributed to LGTB+ and social justice struggles with Azimio, the Kenyan chapter of the Ujamaa collective, and the Ukombozi Library in Nairobi. She had planned to carry out research on WhatsApp and social movement organising in social justice centres in Kenya, but when the Covid-19 crisis started, Angela found herself confined in Johannesburg and started to engage with activists there, turning her research into a critical study of how the use of Zoom has impacted activism in Johannesburg during the Covid-19 crisis. Angela plans to interview about 15 community leaders in their communities and her research promises to deliver critical, cutting-edge analysis of social movements in South Africa during the period of Covid-19.

Tafadzwa Antonater Choto is the other winner of the scholarship. Tafadzwa is a Zimbabwean long-time activist who has gone back to study after years of activist engagement with Zimbabwean leftist politics. Her proposal struck us a promising Gramscian analysis of Zimbabwe’s working-class history from 1995 to 2002. She plans to interview rank-and-file leaders in factories and other workplaces, but also residents’ associations, women’s movements, student organisations, faith-based movements, and the liberal constitutional reform movement – the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) – to understand how organic intellectuals emerged in Zimbabwe, within and outside formal political organisations.

Farai Chipato, Tunde Zack-Williams, Bettina Engels and Elisa Greco (LCMRS Committee)

‘Africapitalism’ and the limits of any variant of capitalism

ROAPE

July 16, 2020

In a contribution to ROAPE’s debate on capitalism in Africa, Stefan Ouma provides a critical account of Africapitalism as well as an assessment of the future/s it imagines, what it silences and its potential to transform African economies. Ouma concludes that the ecologically destructive and dehumanizing architecture of our global economic system provides further evidence to condemn any variant of capitalism.

By Stefan Ouma

In 2019, Tanzanians mourned prominent businessperson Ali Mufuruki (1959-2019). Under the umbrella of his InfoTech Investment Group, he championed the cause of indigenous ownership of businesses in the country. He was successful at his trade, representative of a group of ‘Tanzanians of African origin who have been the voice of the private sector during – and since – the transition to liberalization in the 1980s/90s’ (Chachage 2018: 35). He was also an ‘ideational entrepreneur’ (Mkandawire 2014: 182), who promoted the structural transformation of African economies to engender less extraverted and extractive forms of development. With the aim to safeguard the ‘gains of liberalization’, he co-founded and chaired the CEO Roundtable of Tanzania (CEOrt), providing a forum for industry leaders to constructively engage the government on policy issues. Together with his fellow countrymen Rahim Mawji, Moremi Marwa, Gilman Kasiga, he published a book to which the President himself, John Pombe Magufuli wrote the foreword: Tanzania’s Industrialisation Journey, 2016-2056: From an Agrarian to a Modern Industrialised State in Forty Years (2017). Mufuruki also spread his ideas in a TED talk, where he debunked the myth of ‘Africa rising’ with great verve, as some critical political economists have also done (Odoom-Obeng 2015). Yet despite being touted as an ‘intellectual of capital’ by historian Chambi Chachage, you won’t find the term capitalism mentioned in Mufuruki and colleagues’ book other than when another cited author uses the term. Instead, less suspicious terms such as ‘the market’ and ‘the private sector’ are put to use. After all, upebari (capitalism) and mapebari (capitalists) are still terms used widely with a negative connotation in a country where socialism is still enshrined in the constitution.

In contrast, in Nigeria, another intellectual of capital, Tony Elumelu, was far less hesitant to mobilize the vocabulary of capitalism for his purposes when he came up with the term Africapitalism in 2011. Since then, the notion has become a popular hashtag in social media, and now garnishes the titles of at least three books (Edozie 2017; Idemudia and Amaeshi 2019; Amaeshi et al. 2018). Like Mufuruki, Elumelu is someone for whom capitalism has worked very well, having turned the Nigerian United Bank of Africa (UBA) into a pan-African player in the 2000s. He is now the board chairman of Heirs Holding, a pan-African private equity firm based in Lagos. For the past ten years, he has also headed a large philanthropic enterprise dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship across the continent.

Like Mufuruki, Elumelu is representative of ‘Africa’s new, burgeoning capitalist class’ (Edozie 2017: 796) – a new crop of African entrepreneurs who not only have amassed huge fortunes, but who also increasingly shape representations of the continent on matters of economic and social policy in the battle for minds in and beyond Africa (Mkandawire 2014: 179). As argued in a recent post to this blog series by Nigerian historian Moses Ochonu, engagement with this new crop of entrepreneurs is often fraught with two interrelated problems: ‘One is a failure to develop an analytical toolkit that accommodates the capacious and amorphous entrepreneurial lives of Africans who were pigeonholed into the new neoliberal category of the entrepreneur. The second is a failure to adequately critique the exuberant, self-assured discourse of entrepreneurs as economic messiahs and replacements for the economic responsibilities of the dysfunctional African state.’ I am taking this finding as an invitation to critically think through Africapitalism beyond capitalism.

Originally, ‘Africapitalism’ only provided a shadowy outline of a new economic blueprint for structural change in Africa. Elumelu (2011: 7) underlined that ‘its primary goal is greater economic prosperity and social wealth, driven by Africa’s private sector – its domestic economies, markets, and businesses.’ Its agenda, however, became subsequently more philosophically refined as part of an academic project sponsored by Elumelu’s Foundation at the University of Edinburgh School of Business. The Nigerian academics involved reframed the Africapitalist ethos as a set of fundamental values through which capitalism is supposed to be made to work for Africans. ‘[A] sense of progress and prosperity,’ ‘a sense of parity,’ ‘a sense of peace and harmony’ and a ‘sense of place and belongingness’ were put at the heart of the Africapitalist project (Amaeshi and Idemudia 2015:216).

At first it seems puzzling that someone would unashamedly embrace capitalism as an ideology of the future on a continent that has historically most brutally suffered under it, and which until today – by many accounts – continues to do so. Making a case for capitalism so boldly happens rarely anywhere in the world, especially outside the UK and the US, where Milton Friedman and others have promoted capitalism as a free-enterprise system that brings humans’ true nature to the fore. Friedman even ran a TV show on it. Even in other core capitalist countries such as Germany, politicians or business folk tend to use less controversial vocabulary such as ‘the market economy’ or ‘our economic system’ when they talk about the world they inhabit. When the leader of the Youth Wing of the Social Democrats (JUSOS) in Germany explicitly used the term capitalism in 2019 to argue that what is assumed to be God-given can actually be changed (calling for labour to own stakes in large businesses), all hell broke loose. That the term is avoided in public debate happens even more often across Africa.

Most independence governments shunned capitalism as the ideology of the colonizers, and until today, many leaders shy away from openly embracing it as the ideology of choice. Almost 30 years ago, Paul Zeleza noted that even in countries with a history of pro-capitalist development since independence, such as Kenya, politicians, entrepreneurs and academics rarely made a public case for capitalism (Zeleza 1992). A recent piece by ROAPE’s Jörg Wiegratz for this series on roape.net and a 2019 intervention of the Mathare Social Justice Center seem to reaffirm the discursive invisibility of capitalism in at least that corner of the continent.

The enthusiastic promotion of Africapitalism also seems puzzling given that capitalism has become increasingly questioned as an ideology-cum-economic system that can take us into the future. The global financial crisis, all-time high global inequalities, but also the increasingly obvious ecological limits of an economic system based on infinite growth, present challenges to anyone trying to make a continued case for capitalism. Critical books diagnosing capitalism as ready to implode, imagining post-capitalist futures or directly attacking those benefiting disproportionally from the machinations of contemporary capitalism have become plentiful, often reminding us that it is either capitalism or the planet. In the wake of the global financial crisis 2007-8, even the promoters of global corporate elites admit that capitalism has come ‘under siege’ (Porter and Kramer 2011: 62). With debates on inequality and climate change at an all-time high, now even some of the biggest profiteers from financialized capitalism, such as investment banker Jamie Dimon, want to save capitalism from capitalism. The Corona virus crisis is just the latest product of capitalism’s ‘blasted landscapes’ (Tsing 2015). As Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr recently argued in two widely circulating essays in the German Newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (see here and here), the COVID-19 pandemic is the product of the minority world’s ‘imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen 2012), which partly has been taken up in China and other emerging economies, and now puts the fallout on the rest of us. In a way, it may be considered the harbinger of the climate catastrophe to come – a catastrophe for which only a relatively small part of the world population is responsible (especially if environmental debt is calculated per capita and historically). The Corona crisis also calls into question the debt-financed growth strategies of many African governments, to the extent that a group of 100 African intellectuals have called for a complete overhaul of the African variant of neoliberal capitalism, where road and airport infrastructures and other ‘urban fantasies’ (Obeng-Odoom 2015: 237) are prioritized over human well-being.

At the same time, there have been various developments that help us make sense of why ‘Africapitalism’ as an idea emerged and has been taken up so enthusiastically across Africa, and reverberates powerfully even in times of Corona (Elumelu’s UBA just announced a $14 million COVID-19 relief support across Africa). First, since 2008, Africa has come to be heralded as the last frontier of capitalism, most prominently encapsulated in the ‘Africa rising’ narrative. Although even some intellectuals of capital have been wary of the danger of a single story, such as Mufuruki himself, this narrative has nevertheless redirected the gaze of global capital towards the continent. As the late Thandika Mkandawire pointed out (2014: 172): ‘Ideas matter. While not always decisive, they do have an autonomous and noticeable effect on interests and institutions.’ Indeed, many African corporate and political elites have tried to exploit this moment of increased global attention, especially the new crop of mega-rich entrepreneurs that Elumelu is part of: the Kirubis, Motsepes and Dangotes of the continent.

Elumelu himself seems to admit that Africa should not rise in a business-as-usual mode. To remedy potential conflicts arising from jobless growth, accumulation by resource extraction and increasing demographic pressures, it ‘is in capital’s own interest to think long-term and invest for social impact’ (Elumelu 2011: 13). Why not bet on a mode of production that has, as some would say, proven to be the largest wealth-creating machine in human history? For Africapitalists, it just depends on the variety of capitalism and how inclusive it is made. It is along these lines that promoters of Africapitalism want to free capitalism from its most excessive and socially destructive features, turning it into a win-win machine for capitalists and the communities they ‘serve’. This is supposed to happen through voluntary, private sector-driven initiatives rather than through taming capitalism through public regulation.

Second, there has been an increasing shift in development thinking over the past decade. The private sector is now being hailed as the prime agent of economic change. The entry of philanthropic entities, private equity funds, impact investors and conventional multinationals into the business of development indicates this trend. This has been buttressed by a range of concepts that try to give capitalist activities greater legitimacy, such as ‘inclusive capitalism’, ‘corporate citizenship’, ‘social enterprise’, ‘creating shared value’, ‘impact investing’, or the ‘double/triple bottom line approach’. Africapitalism relates to these intellectual currents, but at the same time claims to supersede them. In such an environment, it sounds increasingly natural to make entrepreneurs – as ‘wealth creators,’ ‘job creators,’ ‘innovators,’ ‘problem-solvers,’ ‘disruptors’ and ‘givers’ the prime movers of economic transformation. Yet those who also create value, be it the state or workers, are largely absent in this narrative.

Third, there are long-standing questions about how to think about Africa’s future development trajectories and through which means ‘development’ could best be achieved. The idea of Africapitalism makes a bold contribution to this debate, reinjecting African agency into the discourse of economic transformation. Many independence leaders were seriously committed to a politics of the future, creating long-term visions of how their societies should develop (e.g., Nkrumah, Senghor, Nyerere) (Mbembe 2013). This particular version of politics of the future faded away from the 1980s onwards, when the projects they were based on had run into economic troubles. ‘The African state,’ variously described as socialist, rent-seeking, vampiristic, centralised, clientelist, neopatrimonial, predatory, kleptocratic or failed (Mkandawire 2001: 293), was suddenly blamed for all kinds of evils and the lost development decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Statist and home-grown academic visions of societal transformation were gradually replaced by copy-and-paste adjustment practices. Issa Shivji aptly described this situation a few years ago: ‘The globalization hegemony dictated that the “villages” of the globalizing world did not need thinkers, but only purveyors of thought generated elsewhere.’ (cited in Wuyts 2008: 1089). Until the early 2000s, African economies had become even greater importers of foreign concepts, something that has always been part of the (post-)colonial experience.

The longstanding calls for the domestication of ‘development’ (Macamo 2005), moving beyond imperial Western thought, overcoming the colonization of mind and language, as well as the more recent calls for Africentricity, Africonsciousness and Afromodernity have been responses to this predicament. The idea of Africapitalism fits with the idea that development in Africa should happen with a ‘sense of place’ (Amaeshi and Idemudia 2015: 217). It connects with the long-standing desire of African and African Diaspora people to reassert the continent’s role in the world. Frantz Fanon once described this desire powerfully in The Wretched of the Earth, ‘….if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers.’

While closely linked to its Nigerian origin, Africapitalism also ties into and takes inspiration from another vision for Africa’s transformation, Ubuntu economics. Both philosophies are said to ‘embed within themselves the principles of self-determination, African agency, African knowledge and an Africacentric symbolic identity’ (Edozie 2017: 797). Both philosophies are mobilized to carve out new spaces of thought and practice from the global political economy for accumulating both economic and social wealth in Africa. But Africapitalists have no problem with the foreignness of capitalism, and for the more libertarian kind it is in fact socialist practices that are foreign imports into a context where ‘(p)rofit, trade, and entrepreneurship are inherent aspects of indigenous economic systems’ (Okediran 2013:. 79). For these libertarian Africapitalists, the capitalist ethic is a product of nature (rather than a product of history) – a finding which has been critiqued in an earlier contribution to this blog series by Horman Chitonge. ‘Africapitalism’ also can be related to the long-standing concept of Pan-Africanism, but comes across as a globally more appealing and neutral concept, as Pan-Africanism always had an anti-imperial and anti-capitalist ideological core.

So, what does the concept actually deliver for the continent (and its diaspora people) in terms of transformative, emancipatory and redistributive potential? Despite the welcome Afrocentric and Afroconscious rhetoric, Africapitalists, much like most other politicians and business folk fail to fully ‘open up the present to more than its own repetition’ (Berg Johansen and de Cock 2017: 2). This does not deny the need for Africans to advance a more humane, place-based, and connected economy that tries to radically transcend capitalism as the continent has known it. As Mkandawire recently remarked, we should be essentially upbeat about Africa, but it ‘must be given space, or capture space, to think its own way out of its predicament’ (cited in Meagher 2019: 540).

At a time when the true costs of climbing up the capitalist ladder are more obvious than ever; Africa is in a good position to generate real and viable alternative economic futures. But this requires much more than promoting Afrocentric entrepreneurship and needs an approach that enables us to seriously break with the coloniality of power, knowledge and being that has shaped Africa’s adverse insertion into the global political economy since the colonial period (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020). It is only this systemic overhaul which will set African economies on a new footing.

After all, Africanization does not equal decolonization (Mbembe 2016). By relying on categories that were often formed during colonial encounters (such as ‘growth,’ ‘efficiency’; ‘nature serves man as a resource’), by largely subscribing to the current orthodoxy in management and business speak, and by not being grounded in a broader alliance of social forces and ontologies, Africapitalists fail to make visible and utilize the full range of unrealized possibilities that the continent offers when it comes to thinking through capitalism beyond capitalism. They promote a world where redistribution happens because of entrepreneurs’ commitments to the idea of shared value rather than improved tax collection or other forms of redistribution. Africapitalists also are ‘devoted to the unlikely idea that the bitter conflicts between labour and capital in the West can be replaced on the continent by capitalism informed by the humanistic solidarities of Ubuntu.’[1] They imagine a world where capitalist enterprises create economic and social value in the communities they serve through win-win arrangements. It is also a world where large foundations are tasked with economic and social transformation more broadly, despite the increasing evidence of the flaws of the venture philanthropy model/philanthrocapitalism, and the wanting labour, environmental and corporate governance track record of companies that are being cited as good examples of Africapitalism (take Zambeef or Nakumatt, for instance).

In order to revoke the current economic order, we need concerted, pan-African and radical efforts to remake African economies, which are at the same time grounded in the awareness that Africa is part of a wider global ensemble in which humans are one among many species. This does not mean that Africans must scale down on their desire to live dignified, fulfilled, and secure lives, but that anyone engaging with the future must dare to move outside a frame that may hold for only another few decades before it will fully fall apart. Such questions may be dismissed against the background that Africapitalism is first and foremost about attaining the discursive power to shape one’s own economic destiny in a region where millions of people are yet to enjoy the material wealth of the North, or many emerging economies, and thus lack the privilege to think beyond capitalism. During such an endeavour, questions of environmentalism may be treated rather agnostically (Edozie 2017). Yet, even though attaining the power to shape one’s own destiny and developing a set of discursive, place-based concepts that can help build alliances around a project of economic transformation are certainly key to more prosperous African futures, it can be questioned whether this should be done through practices that have historically built wealth in certain regions of the world only on the back of cheap nature, food, labour and energy elsewhere.

The COVID-19 pandemic is nature’s way to fight back, bringing the technologically sophisticated yet often ecologically destructive and dehumanizing architecture of contemporary supply chain capitalism to its knees, further proves the ecological and social limits of any variant of capitalism. It is worth re-reading Fanon: ‘So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it. Humanity expects other things from us than this grotesque and generally obscene emulation.’

I would like to thank Saumya Premchander, Leiyo Singo and Jörg Wiegratz for their valuable comments that helped improve this blogpost. Padraig Carmody, Chambi Chachage, Eric Otieno and James Murphy kindly commented on a previous and extended version of this blogpost, which was published in Africapitalism: Sustainable Business and Development in Africa by Idemudia and Amaeshi (eds) 2019.

Stefan Ouma teaches Economic Geography at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He has published widely on global commodity chains, agrarian change, and the financialization of food and agriculture. His overriding research goal is to rematerialize ‘the economy’ in times of seemingly unbounded economic relations and to open it up for political debate regarding the more sustainable and just pathways and forms of economy-making.

Featured Photograph: Businesses opening up their tables for the day at the Kariakoo market, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (12 October 2017).

Notes

[1] Breckenridge, Keith (2020): What happened to the theory of African Capitalism? University of Witwatersrand, Unpublished Manuscript.

Webinar: Slavery, Colonialism & Black Lives Matter Movement Today

ROAPE

July 14, 2020

Overthrowing the Weight of History: Slavery, Colonialism & Black Lives Matter Movement Today

An uprising against racism not seen in generations has exploded across the US and around the globe. Resistance to police murder has widened rapidly to challenge the deep roots of brutal oppression and exploitation: calls to abolish the police grow louder while monuments to the US Confederacy, UK slave owners and settler-colonialism are crashing down at the hands of protesters.

In Africa, Europe and beyond, the weight of history is under fire, from the glorification of imperialism to the enduring colonial legacies of policing, global financial institutions and militarism. With the world fighting back, a past built on racism and inequality is being confronted at every turn in struggling for a new kind of society.

Join a conversation with activists and writers from the US, Kenya and Britain on the current moment, its challenges and hopes for revolutionary change.

Date: Monday, 27 July, 2020
Time: 8 PM Kenya / 6 PM UK / 1 PM EDT
We will be live-streaming on ROAPE’s YouTube channel here and on ROAPE’s facebook page here.

The meeting will also be simultaneously translated into Kiswahili, please go here for the translation.

Speakers:

Robert Cuffy is a revolutionary socialist who is a co-founder or the Socialist Workers Alliance of Guyana. He lives in Brooklyn, works in Child Welfare and is a rank and file member of DC37 local 371 union and is also part of the Afrosocialist caucus and Labor Branch of the NYC Democratic Socialist of America.

Lena Grace Anyuolo is a writer and social justice activist with Mathare Social Justice Centre and Ukombozi Library. Her writing has appeared in Jalada’s 7th anthology, The Elephant and on roape.net here.

Jesse Benjamin is a scholar-activist and a member of the Walter Rodney Foundation board and founder of the Walter Rodney Public Speakers Series. His publications include the recently co-edited Walter Rodney volumes with Verso, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (2018) and The Groundings With My Brothers (2019). There is an extensive interview with him here.

Hakim Adi teaches African history and the history of the African diaspora at the University of Chichester in the UK. He is an international expert on Pan-Africanism and communism and the history of the African diaspora. An interview with Hakim on roape.net can be read here.

Hosted by: Walter Rodney Speakers Series, Global South Research Consortium, The Walter Rodney Foundation and Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), NYC Afrosocialist & Socialists of Color caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America

ROAPE’s Ruth First Prize – Paddington Mutekwe

ROAPE

July 13, 2020

The Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy is pleased to announce the 2019 winner of the Ruth First prize. The prize is awarded for the best article published by an African author in the journal in a publication year.

This year, the prize was awarded to Paddington Mutekwe for his article ‘Resistance and repression in Zimbabwe: a case study of Zimplats mine workers’. It was published in ROAPE Volume 46, Issue 160 in Autumn 2019.

The article ‘contends that contemporary resistance in the mining sector in Zimbabwe is grounded in everyday acts of resistance and is directed towards power relationships exercised at work. Overt forms of resistance have been waning in Zimbabwe because of various pieces of draconian legislation, and subterranean forms of resistance have been gaining traction and deserve to be studied. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observations at Zimplats, the article employs Scott’s concept of the ‘weapons of the weak’, which posits that covert forms of resistance are favourable when open and collective resistance seems dangerous, as a means to understand some of the current dynamics of worker struggles in Zimbabwe.’

ROAPE Prize Committee members commented on Mutekwe’s article:

‘It was well structured and argued, drawing on existing literature on infrapolitics, but extending Scott’s argument by showing there is collective organisation in this form of resistance as well. Mutekwe is also effective in drawing out the voices of individual mineworkers and their struggles with exploitation. Overall, this paper resonates with Ruth First’s legacy, which is grounded in labour struggles, race, class and political movements.’
‘I found this reading the closest to First’s work because of the strength and primacy of the voice of the “oppressed” in the data. …letting the voices of the workers, proletariats, peasants, and other oppressed speak through their oppression and emancipation stands out as a hallmark of Ruth First’s work. … this was the most accessible reading for me in terms of clarity and articulation of ideas around subterranean resistance and in terms of its very clearly written theoretical framework based on Scott’s “weapons of the weak” and the very informing and equally clear literature review and research context. In short this piece is the freest from the sort of academic and other kinds of jargon that often make research meanings inaccessible to those outside particular fields of research.’
‘this is the liveliest of all the papers. Looking at – through Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ – resistance in name-calling, absenteeism and foot-dragging etc. … Low level of strike action and state repression has led to a growth of other forms of “subversion”, the paper uses Zimplats as a case-study. The “name calling” section – Tollgate and Satanist – made me hoot with delight. Quite a fitting submission for the RF prize.’
‘Of all the pieces, it was the one that most reflected the spirit of Ruth First.’

Paddington Mutekwe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). His doctoral research investigates the dialectical relationship between resistance and repression in Civil Society Organisations in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2020. He is a member of the UJ Centre for Social Change (UJCSC). His research interests include issues related to social movements, resistance, race, class, labour and politics.

He holds a master’s degree in Industrial Sociology from UJ that investigated subterranean forms of workplace resistance at Zimplats between 2000 and 2016. Paddington has worked as a research assistant with the UJCSC, as a tutor and currently as an assistant lecturer in the UJ Department of Sociology.

The article can be read for free until July 2021 and can be accessed here.

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