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From Africa to Asia: Political Economy, Solidarity and Liberation

By
ROAPE
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On 6-8 January a three-day workshop was held in Tunis, it brought together scholars, activists, organizations and artists who work for the liberation of Asia and Africa. Each day this week roape.net will be posting contributions by participants of the workshop on political economy, knowledge production and solidarity and liberation. In this introduction to the themes of the workshop, the organisers celebrate a gathering of anti-imperialist, anti- and decolonial researchers and activists who shared experiences, knowledge, strategies and tactics with the overall goal of liberation.

Recent years have witnessed a continuation and in many ways deepening of the neocolonial assault on the states, ecologies, social movements, peasant and working-class communities of the Global South, spearheaded by a multiplicity of neoliberal, neo-colonial and imperialist actors. These have ranged from the more obvious forms of military interventions, occupations, bases, and drone warfare to the more subtle forms of economic warfare, including sanctions, neoliberal conditioned loans, debt, and ‘free’ trade agreements designed to facilitate the penetration of foreign capital and goods and reproduce colonial relations of power. Border imperialism, or the racialized militarization of Global North borders in the service of capitalist accumulation, ensures that those fleeing from capitalist and neocolonial induced destabilization and deteriorating socio-economic and ecological conditions across Asia and Africa face a more perilous journey. The death of these migrants or exploitation of those who survive is systematically ignored by a mainstream press that collaborates with the ruling class in their dehumanization.

Increasingly, Global South states have entered into unequal security ‘partnerships’, through which imperialist policing and war-making are outsourced to structurally weaker states, entailing an offloading of physical and material sacrifices on behalf of Global North accumulation. These so-called alliances have the effect of retrenching the unrepresentative rule of socio-economically disconnected national bourgeoisies and embroiling the peoples of the Global South within militarized conflicts that are not of their own making and certainly not in their interest. They also alienate neighboring states from one another making the goal of regional integration – a cornerstone of liberation as imagined by the anti-colonial struggles of the post-World War Two era – even more of a chimera. These neocolonial patterns of accumulation are not only sustained through violent military and economic means, they are also enabled and normalized through an ideological and discursive infrastructure in which the hegemonic modes of knowledge are embedded, further confounding the aim of liberation. It is these shared political, economic and social conditions, which are a product of colonial legacies, neocolonial interventions as well as of resistance, that we contend give the geo-political demarcation ‘Global South’ its meaning.

Despite the bleakness of this snapshot of the current state of unequal global relations of power, there continue, as always, to be glimmers of hope in the spaces of liberation and resistance wrought by popular struggle. These include the movements of resistance to neoliberalism and imperialism rising up across the globe: from Haiti to Algeria, Bolivia to Sudan, Mali to Lebanon. The people continue to reject neocolonial and capitalist forms of wealth extraction, exploitation and repression. Solidarity expressed through brandishing the flags of other countries on the receiving end of colonial and imperialist power (e.g. Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela) or protests staged in front of settler-colonial and imperialist embassies (e.g. Israel, US, France) are signs that the peoples and movements of the Global South, including the Global South within the North (marginalized and exploited communities subjected to the violence of racial capitalism within the heart of Empire) continue to draw connections between the conditions and experiences of oppression, exploitation and control across settler-colonial and racial capitalist states and elaborate the interconnections between struggles. In so doing, they build on the shoulders of historical experiences of regional and transnational expressions of solidarity and attempts at institutionalizing solidarity, such as the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in Cairo in 1957, the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana in 1958, the establishment of the Black Panther Party’s International Office in Algeria, the Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America in Havana in 1966 (Tricontinental Conference), the First Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism.

It was this context of power and resistance that prompted us to organize a workshop that brought together a group of individuals committed to liberation. After an initial organizing meeting in Beirut in the spring of 2019, we agreed to a thematic and regional focus: Political Economy, Knowledge, Solidarity, and Liberation: From Asia to Africa. Tunis, as a Global South capital, was deliberately chosen as the place to hold the workshop. The workshop was co-sponsored by Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung- North Africa, Afro-Asian Futures Past Research Program (American University of Beirut), the Frantz Fanon Foundation, and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. The individuals who came together for the workshop are all broadly engaged in the endeavor of insurgent knowledges, and are differentially placed within universities, research institutes, artist spaces or social movements, and resident in the Global South or ideologically committed to its liberation. It was intended that this would be the first of what is envisioned as an annual gathering with the goal of building an engaged community of anti- imperialist, anti- and decolonial scholars, activists, organizations and artists, and to share experiences, knowledge, pedagogies, strategies and tactics with the overall goal of liberation.

Despite the obvious connections, it is rare that intellectuals working on epistemological questions within the post- and decolonial framework are brought into direct conversation with those working in the domain of political economy. Yet without being rooted in materialist analysis and a specific political project, the post- and decolonial approach can be reduced to a mere ‘metaphor’- an abstract intellectual exercise removed from material realities- rather than a blueprint for resistance. Conversely, a materialist analysis that targets the mechanisms and effects of capitalist and imperialist forms of accumulation without understanding how our ways of knowing are equally bound up with interlocking systems of power that exploit and dispossess the masses in the Global South as well as the Global South in the North, will inevitably fall short of what is required for liberation.

As individuals whose own research and life experiences confirm the extraction, exploitation and ecological devastation across a North-South geopolitical division of power and the globe, we reject the increasing tendency within academic circles to dismiss accounts of imperialism and neocolonialism as outdated modes of analysis lacking in ‘nuance’. In doing so, we build upon a long tradition of critique developed by Marxist political economists hailing from the dependency and world systems schools, who have taught us the importance of starting our analysis with the Global South’s unequal incorporation into the global capitalist world system. Scholars from this tradition foreground modes of production, patterns of accumulation, class relations, and the close ties between capitalism, colonialism and imperialism in their analysis of questions of land ownership and dispossession, debt, inequality, resource extraction, ecological degradation, trade imbalances and conflict. They adhere to a relational understanding of power and development and accumulation through dispossession.

Apart from some notable exceptions, political economy approaches have often failed to, or only superficially addressed, epistemological concerns. Post- and decolonial approaches to knowledge have sought to fill this gap. Drawing on the works of anti-colonial theorists of the 1950s and 1960s, the Black radical tradition, as well as Asian, African, Indigenous and South American scholars, this body of work approaches colonialism as much more than material relations of unequal power rooted in capitalist expansion, and advocates a broader understanding of colonialism as underpinning the modern capitalist system and an ongoing mode of global power relations and social and political organization. Decolonial approaches challenge these power relations and the underpinning ideological and discursive structures that enable and normalize them. They can span from critical epistemologies that challenge the dominance of the westernized university and the entanglements of the knowledge it produces in colonial and capitalist agendas, to popular education projects. This includes those engaged in reviving insurgent circuits of knowledge, including the transnational solidarity and ideological exchanges that were dominant features of anti-colonial struggles, within and across Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Afro-Asian, Black power, and Marxist international movements. They also entail projects concerned with challenging the Eurocentrism and knowledge hierarchies that underpin colonial modernity, often disguised as objective ‘expertise’, focusing instead on excavating previously excluded and marginalized knowledges, including those produced by Indigenous peoples, women of color, peasants, and workers, in the service of liberation rather than accumulation.

On the question of knowledge ‘production,’ a term which workshop participants noted derives from an extractivist and capitalist logic that is at odds with an attempt to move towards libratory knowledge, participants explored the different ways in which hegemonic forms of capitalist, neoliberal, colonial, and patriarchal knowledge are reproduced. Presentations addressed how the institutional settings of knowledge production shape the possibilities for insurgent pedagogies, subjectivities and praxis. Mjiba Frehiwot and Carlos Cardoso pointed to the limits as well as radical possibilities of higher education in the service of liberation. Employing Kwame Nkrumah’s ‘Zonal Analysis’, Frehiwot discussed the need for African-centered pedagogy as well as the teaching of socialist theories grounded within the experiences and needs of Africans, and ways in which to take over knowledge production in the university for the service of political liberation. Focusing on Amilcar Cabral’s contributions to insurgent pedagogy, Cardoso examined the nexus between knowledge production, historical consciousness and the construction of new utopias, concluding with a call for Southern epistemologies and Tri-continental academic solidarity between students and scholars of the South. Malek Lakhal brought the discussion to the question of power and ‘civil society’, examining the colonization of NGO spaces by western modes of knowing and approaches to organizing, with ‘best practices’ mobilized as means to tame feminist organizing in Tunisia.

Corinna Mullin and Moutaa El Waer focused on the colonial-capitalist university. El Waer discussed the long tradition of leftist student movements challenging the Tunisian university as a state apparatus designed to maintain status quo relations of power, though also noted the limitations of these movements in overcoming the knowledge hierarchies that universities reproduce in the service of capitalism. Focusing on the Tunisian example as well, Mullin applied the historical sociological approach to discuss transformations in the African university from the colonial era to the current neoliberal moment, urging us to consider the role of both material and epistemological contexts in shaping the kinds of struggle that have unfolded both within and beyond the university.

Anaheed Al-Hardan, Layan Fuleihan and Ghassane Koumiya urged us to look beyond the university for sites of insurgent knowledge making. Al-Hardan examined the challenges to engaging in south-south knowledge production during times of insurrections, discussing the recent experience of the ‘Theorizing from the Global South School’ that was convened in Beirut for Arab and African students that coincided with the eruption of the protests and civil disobedience in Beirut in October 2019. Fuleihan, on the other hand, reflected on the challenges and opportunities of popular and political education in the imperialist core, arguing that liberatory knowledge projects should have the aim of transforming social relations, empowering the poor and dispossessed and ultimately facilitating the path towards a socialist and internationalist future.  Both Brahim Rouabah and Hela Yousfi also called for a shift in our gaze away from ‘traditional’ producers of knowledge such as scholars, researchers, and other ‘experts’. Brahim Rouabah drew our attention to the intersection between knowledge and cultural production in revolutionary times, with a focus on the Algerian protest movement that began in February 2019, and whose chants and songs contain sophisticated analysis of the political and economic context as well as alternative political projects. Hela Yousfi discussed the need to move beyond Eurocentric frames of analysis and have an approach to knowledge that is emancipatory but not essentialist, urging us to look towards peasants and workers as alternative producers of liberatory knowledges.

Max Ajl’s presentation brought together epistemological and political economy questions in his discussion of the Tunisian agro-economist Slaheddine el-Amami’s work. He reflected on the intersections of different scales of imperialist and local power that kept Amami’s ‘auto-centered’ alternative to the colonial and capitalist model of development from prevailing in Tunisia, as well as similar models from taking hold elsewhere across the Global South. In presenting their book Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia (2019), Ray Bush and Habib Ayeb urged us to think from a long durée historical as well as geo-spatial perspective about the political and economic causes of food insecurity, and how current imperialist interventions continue to be resisted by peasant struggles and small farmers, themselves crucial sites of knowledge making.

Picking up the theme of how the ongoing colonial condition underpinning the present shapes unequal patterns of accumulation through dispossession, Ndongo Samba Sylla’s presentation on the CFA Franc, used by fourteen West African countries economically bound to France, instructed us on the forms of monetary policy that continue to underpin neocolonial relations of power and urged us to beware of recent attempts to co-opt the growing resistance movement to the CFA. Chafik Ben Rouine similarly considered how trade, finance and loan agreements with International Financial Institutions as well as powerful western states and institutions replicate the unequal relations of power that characterized the ‘colonial pact’, and which continue to facilitate Global North wealth drain from Tunisia. Employing the institutional ethnographic method to the Tunisian parliamentary context, Nada Trigui presented an anatomy of the legislative process, with a focus on the passage of a controversial bill on land ownership. She demonstrated how neo-colonial relations with the EU continue to shape African, in this case, Tunisian, policy spaces.

Mireille Mendes-France Fanon’s presentation brought us back to the foundational role of slavery in the emergence of capitalism and lasting reverberations. These can be seen in the racialized forms of unequal accumulation across the globe, and our very understanding of who is considered a human, with implications for how worth gets assigned to victims of political and structural violence. Azzedine Badis picked up this theme by examining how the so-called ‘War on Terror’ has been used in the French context to further normalize the dehumanization of the ‘indigènes’ (racialized communities from France’s former colonies as well as neocolonies). This has enabled violence against already marginalized communities within the metropole as well across the African continent where France’s extraction of natural resources and other forms of wealth drain take place under the guise of allegedly fighting terror. Samar Al Bulushi’s similarly focused on how the ‘War on Terror’ obfuscates the particular local, regional and global power struggles and forms of accumulation through military capitalism that have embroiled the east of Africa. She brought our attention to how even institutions that were originally designed for the purposes of transnational African solidarity, such as the African Union, have themselves become imbricated within matrixes and logics of neocolonial power.

Mabrouka M’Barek reflected on her experiences of participating in the Global Working Group Beyond Development, highlighting the benefits of collective and South- South knowledge production in the face of the what Anibal Quijano has described as the ‘colonial matrix of power’. In addition to discussing the Working Group’s book ‘Cities of Dignity’, M’Barek covered her experiences as an elected member of the Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly (2011-2014) and her work towards realizing the aims of the 2010-2011 Tunisian uprising both inside and outside state institutions. Following up with the theme of the Tunisian uprising, Teycir Ben Nasser projected her film, the ‘Revolution is Here’, which presents a class and regional cross-section of different perspectives on socio-economic and political change and continuity since 2011. Reminding us that revolution is an ongoing process, Ben Nasser brought in many examples of organized and everyday forms of resistance, from ecological and cooperative projects, to pedagogical innovations and the forging of spaces for creative exchange. The Tunisian artist-activist collective, ‘Les Artivistes’ presented some of the videos they made as part of the Block ALECA campaign, demanding an end to the government’s neoliberal policies and a rejection of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (ALECA) between Tunisia and the European Union.

Prompted by Wangui Kimari’s opening of a discussion on whether South-South solidarity is at all possible, participants also engaged in discussions regarding some of the challenges to this solidarity in the context of historical legacies of colonialism and slavery, as well as the ongoing political, economic, military as well as cultural onslaught on the Global South and alternative ways of imagining and pursuing development and community. On the last day, participants reflected on the discussions prompted by the workshop, and about their limitations. Though many felt that the meeting was an important first step to begin a conversation and exchange strategies on knowledge, political economy, solidarity and liberation from Asia to Africa, suggestions were made about how to better bring those involved in work around knowledge production and political economy approaches in particular in conversation with each other. For example, it was suggested that individuals working on political economy could think about the epistemological underpinnings of their methodological approaches, whereas those working on knowledge production could be asked to reflect upon the material conditions of their epistemological concerns. Another suggestion was to start with the political-economy presentations in order to ensure the discussions on knowledge production are rooted in materialist analysis. Some felt that more activists should be brought in and that they should begin and frame the discussions. Crucially, participants left feeling a renewed sense of commitment to developing these conversations and networks to further the aim of building South-South solidarity with the aim of liberation.

In the coming days, we will be posting blogs from a number of contributors at the workshop. Each gives a powerful indication of the debates and issues raised in Tunis: Ndongo Samba Sylla on French monetary imperialism; Samar Al-Bulushi on the endless war in Somalia; Max Ajl on the Tunisian radical agronomist, Slaheddine el-Amami; Corinna Mullin on the struggles to decolonize the university of the Global South and Carlos Cardoso on knowledge production in the universities of Portuguese-speaking African states.

The Organizers

Lionel Cliffe Memorial Research Scholarship

By
ROAPE
-

Call for Applications

The Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) announces a small research grants competition for African scholars and/or 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. In response to this, ROAPE is offering up to two small research grants (value £3000). The process of selection of proposals, as well as their expected format, is outlined below.

ROAPE is a refereed journal committed to encouraging high quality research and fostering excellence in the understanding of African political economy. A political economy approach entails a critical understanding of the social relationships, particularly the power relationships, that mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption of resources. It requires us to ask who produces what and for whom and hence an investigation into social relations that are generated by struggles over livelihoods and exploitation of the many by the few. Radical political economy represents a form of engagement with those struggles.

ROAPE is listed in the Thomson Reuters Social Sciences Citation Index and published quarterly by Taylor & Francis. Since 1974 it has provided radical analysis of trends, issues and social processes in Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change. It has paid particular attention to the political economy of inequality, exploitation and oppression and struggles against them, whether driven by global forces or local ones such as class, race, community and gender. It sustains a critical analysis of the nature of power and the state in Africa in the context of capitalist globalisation.

For more details about the journal and examples of published articles please click here. For other journal activities, see www.roape.net

Eligibility

Applicants should be nationals of an African country and residents in an African country. Applicants who are based in or studying outside Africa will not be considered. Priority will be given to younger scholars and activists who are not yet established and who do not have alternative source of funding for primary research. Joint applications (by two candidates or more) meeting these criteria will also be considered.

How to apply

Applications should be sent by email to the following address: lcmrs@roape.net

Please make sure that you include these words in the title of your email: ‘Lionel Cliffe Memorial Research Scholarship’.

Your application should contain:

1. A brief outline of your research proposal, consisting of:

  • a title
  • an abstract of no more than 100 words, clarifying the political economy framing of the research
  • an outline of no more than 200 words, including a section on the methodology to be adopted in the proposed study

2. your CV with:

  • relevant biographical info (name; age; sex; contact details; nationality – please specify if you have more than one nationality; current residence – please specify if you have double residence)
  • educational qualifications
  • activist experience
  • research experience
  • your current employment circumstances, including any study or internship programme you are enrolled in, with specification of your remuneration if applicable.

3. a motivation letter explaining how you meet the criteria and why you think you are a good candidate for the LCMRS

4. two full references, inclusive of position/institutional affiliation; email addresses, phone numbers and (if possible) skype contacts. If you are shortlisted, your referees will be asked to produce a reference letter on a short notice.

The deadline for applications is 15 March  2020

What happens after you apply

A selection panel will be drawn from ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.

Selection will proceed in two stages. A short list will be drawn up. If you are short-listed, your referees will be asked to produce reference letters. You will also be asked to submit a more extended account of your research proposal (no more than 1000 words), under the same headings as above, but expanding on the research problem and the key research questions. It should also include a timeline showing your research plan and a budget of how the grant would be used. This may include costs incurred for travel, accommodation, subsistence, equipment (for example a voice recorder), research permits, research assistance, and/or photocopying and printing.

Assessment

The two successful candidates will be offered some limited mentoring to support their efforts. Mentorship will be provided by a member of the Editorial Working Group, via email and skype meetings. At the end of a one-year research period, the candidate must submit a one-page report with a summary account of what has been achieved.

The final requirement is to submit for consideration to ROAPE an article (of no more than 8000 words) based on the research funded by the grant. No guarantee of publication can be given, as the article will be peer-reviewed according to the standard procedure followed by the journal.

Payment of the grant

The grant is £3,000 and will be paid in three tranches. Upon acceptance of a research proposal, ROAPE will disburse 1/3 of the grant (£1,000) to successful candidates to contribute towards direct research expenses. The second tranche (£1,000) will be paid after submission of the first-year report. Part of the second tranche can be claimed in advance if the first tranche has been used up, upon provision of all receipts of expenses incurred upon.

The third tranche (£1,000) will be paid following the formal submission of an article to ROAPE.

Deadlines

  1. Deadline for applications: 15 March 2020.
  2. Selection of short list: 20 April 2020, with notification to short-listed candidates.
  3. Submission of extended proposals from short-listed candidates: 1 June 2020
  4. Final selection and notification to successful candidates: 1 July 2020 – payment of first tranche of grant (1/3 of the total, £1,000)
  5. Start of research period and mentorship programme: 1 July 2020
  6. First-year summary report: 1 July 2021(payment of second tranche)
  7. Formal submission of article to ROAPE: no later than 1 July 2022 (payment of third tranche)

At the end of a one-year research period, the researcher must submit a report with a summary account of what has been achieved. The final requirement is to submit for consideration to ROAPE an article (of no more than 8000 words) based on the research funded by the grant. The disbursement of the third tranche of the grant is conditional upon submission of the manuscript. No guarantee of publication can be given, as the article will be peer-reviewed according to the standard procedure followed by the journal.

If you are in doubt about your eligibility or require further information just get in touch at: lcmrs@roape.net

Marxism and the Climate Crisis: African Eco-Socialist Alternatives

By
ROAPE
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Introducing an important book series on Democratic Marxism in Africa, Vishwas Satgar explains that the project is premised on a rejection of the authoritarianism of vanguardist politics and the need to learn critical lessons from all the left projects of the 20th century. There is a rich inheritance of emancipatory Marxism in Africa, which includes Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Harold Wolpe and many others. Today, Satgar argues, the challenge is to defeat carbon capitalism accelerating the climate crisis and fomenting exclusionary nationalisms and for this there has to be a return to Marx.

By Vishwas Satgar

In global discourse we rarely hear the media, academy and global power structures talking about the crisis of neoliberal theory or theories of identity despite the glaring failures of these bodies of thought. By contrast, the ‘crisis of Marxism’ has received vociferous attention at different moments in the 20th century.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, many intellectuals wrote yet another public eulogy for Marxism and declared the victory of liberal capitalism, with the US standard as the terminus of modern civilisation and history.  This begs the question of why has Marxism been put on trial and constantly declared to be in crisis?

There are many approaches to answering this question. First, Marxist theory, grounded in Marx’s conception of alienation, exploitation, historical materialism and a structural theory of capitalism, provided the resources for radical critique but has also held out the promise of emancipation from capitalism.  Second, Marxism imprinted on the three most important political projects of the 20th century: Soviet Socialism, social democracy and revolutionary nationalism. This footprint extended to most parts of the planet. Marxism was the other to capitalism. Third, the Soviet Union, borne out of the Russian Revolution, provided a conscious example of an ‘actually existing socialist society’. This escalated into the ‘Cold War’ and defined a crucial fault-line in global geopolitics. Exterminism of everyone, as E.P. Thompson called it, was assured if a nuclear conflagration came to pass.

In the African context, the Soviet Union provided an inspirational example for the communist parties, some of which attempted scientific socialist experiments (e.g., Angola, Mozambique and even the socialist aspirations of the South African Communist Party).  A Sovietised consciousness also impacted the politics of Cuba, India, Vietnam and China. In some of these countries, central planning, one party states and forced carbon-based industrialisation became defining features. Marxism as official state ideology produced immense harm, violence, ecological destruction, authoritarian intellectual control and ultimately lost its emancipatory potentials. Hierarchal vanguards, claiming to act in the interests of workers or peasant-worker alliances, failed to produce emancipated societies.

It is in this context the Democratic Marxism series has emerged in South Africa, premised on a rejection of the authoritarianism of vanguardist politics (including of Southern African national liberation movements) and the need to learn critical lessons from all the left projects of the 20th century.

For those of us in Africa, there is a rich inheritance of Marxism, which has sat uncomfortably alongside official vanguardist Marxism. Sometimes it has been considered the dissident voice. In the context of the imperialist defeat of post-colonial Africa, including radical Pan-Africanism, and with over three decades of pernicious financialised capitalism, it is crucial we claim these resources for ongoing class and popular struggles. From Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Harold Wolpe and many others, there are crucial Marxist resources to strengthen our struggles and invent a new left imagination.

Some of the richness of our Marxist inheritance is reflected in key debates such as ‘dependency theory versus African capitalism’, or the debates on the accumulation trajectory for Tanzania or modes of production or ‘racial capitalism versus colonialism of a special type’ or the modalities of the agrarian transition.

The Democratic Marxism series seeks to provide a platform for both the retrieval and redeployment of this inheritance for emancipatory struggles. The late Samir Amin understood the importance of this challenge. Hence, in providing an endorsement for the second volume in the Democratic Marxism series titled: Capitalism’s Crises – Class Struggles in South Africa and the World, Amin wrote:  ‘it shows that the processes of global change start from the peripheries of the world system and, for the visible future, that reality will continue to govern the struggles for the emancipation of labour and peoples’.

The remaking of the global political economy over the past four decades has unleashed an unbridled capitalism on a planetary scale. With the spectre of Marxism vanquished, the eco-cidal logic of commodifying everything produced precariousness, gridlocked social reproduction and engendered ecological rifts that imperil our planetary life world.

An Eco-fascism is rising that defends at all costs a carbon-based way of life. For present and future generations, to defeat the carbon capitalism accelerating the climate crisis and fomenting exclusionary nationalisms – the new barbarism – there has to be a return to Marx. Every generation has to come to terms with Marx’s critique of capitalism and his case for socialism – a society that places the needs of human beings and nature, more generally, at the centre.

Going back to Marx’s ecological notebooks (published after Capital) and understanding Marx’s ecology are essential if a non-productivist, feminist eco-socialism is to emerge at the forefront of global struggles. In the third volume in the Democratic Marxism series titled: The Climate Crisis – South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, it is clear that movements central to the life and death struggles of our time are inspired by Marx’s ecology together with other  radical sources of inspiration such as indigenous thought, eco-feminism and radical democratic theory.  Naomi Klein, who provided an endorsement for the volume, wrote: ‘it features some of the best thinking we have from the climate justice forces mapping the way to the next world’ (This volume is  freely downloadable through this link).

For those of us in Africa the climate crisis is arriving with devastating and disproportionate consequences. Climate science has confirmed Southern Africa is a ‘hot spot’ and Africa is heating at twice the global average. Women, children and agrarian societies are being devastated. Cyclones (e.g., Idai and Kenneth), droughts in Southern Africa (affecting about 45 million people), floods and heatwaves are the new abnormal.

The corrupt ruling classes are incapable of dealing with these challenges, and Trump’s eco-fascist project will only increase the harm against the subaltern, more specifically the African imperial subject. In this context, the Climate Crisis volume calls for climate justice sanctions against Trump’s eco-fascist USA; it must be isolated like we isolated the apartheid regime. Moreover, the genocidal impacts of continued fossil fuel extraction and use demands justice. Trump and other carbon ruling classes and CEO’s of fossil fuel corporations should be charged with genocide before the International Criminal Court. The scientific evidence on the link between more carbon capitalism and climate shocks is overwhelming. The time has come to intensify the struggle for a Democratic Eco-Socialist Africa. This is the frontier of a new radical Pan-Africanism.

The Democratic Marxism series showcases innovative re-engagements with Marx, Marxism, and other anti-capitalist ideas. It provides a space for radical scholars and activists to grapple with the big questions of our time but in a rigorous way. To summarise, Democratic Marxism is characterised by the following:

  • Its sources span non-vanguardist grassroots movements, unions, political fronts, mass parties, radical intellectuals, transnational activist networks and parts of the progressive academy;
  • It seeks to ensure the inherent categories of Marxism are theorised within constantly changing historical conditions to find contemporary resonance;
  • Marxism is understood as an unfinished body of social thought and hence challenged by the need to explain the dynamics of a globalising capitalism and the futures of social change;
  • Openness to other forms of anti-capitalist thought and practice, including currents within radical ecology, feminism, emancipatory utopianism and indigenous thought;
  • It does not seek to be a monolithic and singular school of thought but engenders contending perspectives;
  • Democracy is seen as a fundamental part of the history of peoples struggles, as the primary means to constitute a new transformative subject of historical change and as the basis for articulating alternatives to capitalism.

The Democratic Marxism series seeks to elaborate the theorising of a new emancipatory politics for the 21st century.

Vishwas Satgar is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has been an activist for four decades. He is the recipient of the 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award of the World Association for Political Economy for initiating and editing the Democratic Marxism series.

The End of the New Green Revolution in Rwanda?

By
ROAPE
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In a critique of Rwanda’s Green Revolution, An Ansoms argues that the promise of the ‘reconfiguration of the rural landscape’ has failed. Food price inflation rose rapidly while the economies-of-scale of the new system were captured by middlemen and local elites. Yet, the World Bank and the IMF persist in using the so-called Rwandan ‘success story’ to sell neo-liberal policy packages as the panacea for Africa’s development. However opportunities for alternative voices are opening up and criticism is also being picked up by Rwandan policy makers.

By An Ansoms

Previously, on roape.net we called into question the positive impact of a ‘New Green Revolution’ in Rwanda. Particularly in terms of poverty reduction and food security, the results seem mitigated [. Also other authors in this blog series have written extensively upon the inherent contradictions in the analysis of the poverty datasets (see, for example, here)  and the discussion was even picked up by the Financial Times in August 2019 . However, while most critics focus upon the political dimension of this controversial debate, it is important to also look into what happens in Rwanda’s rural hills.

In fact, within Rwanda, the space for criticism around the flaws of the Green Revolution is opening up. International, but also local Rwandan media have published critical accounts. Rwandan civil society organisations have played an important role in renegotiating authorities’ decisions. Local farmers have openly complained to the Rwandan ombudsman’s services. Community debates on local radios have debated about the perverse impact of delayed seed distribution, imposed crop choice, and too rigid policy decisions. And, importantly, these forms of contestation are being picked up by Rwandan policy makers. Ten years after the introduction of the New Green Revolution in Rwanda, the plurality of forms of contestation are resulting in a reconfiguration of the rural landscape.

How? Let’s turn back in time. In the aftermath of the civil war and genocide, Rwandan farmers oriented their strategies towards creating ‘autonomous farming systems’ oriented towards ‘risk minimisation’ and ‘food production’. Rural landscapes were characterised by land fragmentation – sometimes reaching extreme levels. Most land was cultivated with a diversity of crops in multi-cropping arrangements. The average farm of 0,6 hectares was spread over three to four plots on which about eight different crops were cultivated. Most of the harvest was consumed at home. Surpluses were sold – in small quantities – at local markets. People cultivated crops in alignment with overall agro-ecological conditions, but also on the basis of their dietary needs. They navigated between producing as much as possible, while mitigating risks in relation to climate variation and potential crop disease.

Since 2007-2008, Rwandan authorities embarked upon an ambitious project to reorganise the entire agrarian sector. Instead of counting on subsistence-based family farming, the Rwandan government elaborated a ‘Green Revolution strategy’. This strategy aimed at promoting productive farming through a modernisation and professionalization of the entire agrarian sector. A national land law established a centrally-organised land registration system, attributing individual land titles. The Crop Intensification Policy imposed market-oriented cultivation in combination with regional specialisation. A top-down organised administrative chain rigidly translated nationally imposed performance targets to local levels through a system of performance contracts.

The ambitions of Rwanda policy makers fitted neatly within the African Union’s and African Development Bank’s ambitions for primary sector economic development. It also aligned well with the World Bank’s aim for promoting modernised farming systems throughout a ‘New Green Revolution for Sub-Saharan Africa’. Also, major international consortia, such as for example AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, founded in 2006) found in Rwanda a pilot zone for testing out what a profound transformation of the African agricultural sector could entail.

Rwanda’s Green Revolution entailed a fundamental ‘reconfiguration of the rural landscape’. Pilot phases in Rwanda’s marshlands transformed scattered plots into neatly separated squares. Land rights were collectivised and transferred to cooperatives. Multi-cropping was replaced by mono-cropping production, focusing upon priority crops. Cooperative guidelines even imposed particular seed types. In a second stage, also hill-land was absorbed in the rural landscape reconfiguration. The Rwandan government embarked on an ambitious land titling schedule that attributed individual land rights. But in order to obtain those rights – and keep them – farmers had to insert their land into land consolidation programs. Each region’s administration decided upon three to four priority crops, to be cultivated in mono-cropping arrangements. As a result, rural landscapes in the hills changed drastically from scattered plots with a variety of crops to uniform crop coverage and joint organisation. Farmers became increasingly dependent upon market exchange mechanisms. Even rural market landscapes transformed. The presence of local traders selling small surpluses decreased, while large-scale professional traders – often without any roots in the local setting – took over.

However, whereas overall productivity rates rose, small-holder farmers lost their autonomy. They became increasingly dependent upon a system in which their bargaining power was limited. Food price inflation rose rapidly with traders profiting from local scarcities in order to make high profits. In fact, local trickle-down effects of increasing growth were – in most cases – limited. Whereas the economies-of-scale effects of the new system were captured by middle men and local elites; local populations absorbed the increased risk embedded in the modernised system. Decreasing subsidies for imposed seeds and chemical fertilisers; delayed deliveries; imposed cultivation modalities not adapted to local agro-ecological diversity… An increasing number of defaults started to reach the surface.

Eventually, these defaults became more and more apparent in the rural landscapes. In many locations, farmers tried to ‘cheat’ by cultivating non-authorised crops in hidden locations. Initially, these forms of resistance remained well hidden beneath the surface for fear of being punished with fines, land confiscation, or even imprisonment. In 2016-2017, however, farmers turned to a more drastic form of resistance. At various locations in different regions, farmers decided to stop cultivating altogether. The phenomenon of ‘uncultivated land’ – normally very rare in the land-scarce and overpopulated context of Rwanda – became increasingly visible. In certain locations, entire terraces were left uncultivated because of disappointing experiences in the years before, or because land had become so degraded that it was no longer worth the effort. Farmers indicated that degradation was the result of excessive and wrong use of chemical fertilisers, or because of erroneously applied terracing techniques.

Eventually, it was the prospect of the 2017 presidential elections that led to a ‘breach in the rigidity’ with which Green Revolution policy prescriptions were imposed. With various zones affected by food insecurity, and by fear of having elections in a time of food shortage, president Kagame himself gave the order to turn the table. He ordered his administration to loosen the strings, and to reapprove the cultivation of traditionally important crops such as sweet potatoes and sorghum. In addition, authorities were urged to be more flexible in response to farmers’ concerns. These decisions decreased the pressure upon farmers’ food systems. Multi-cropping reappeared, although initially limited to particular prescribed crop types.

After Kagame’s re-election, this evolution continued. A previously ignored debate on disappointing poverty evolutions became a hot topic within Rwandan policy circles – although mostly discussed behind the behind screen. President Kagame from his side publically raised the issue of high child malnutrition rates during the 2018 national leadership retreat. As we illustrated in a previous blog, certain authorities tried to push away policy makers’ responsibility in pointing to farmers’ lack of knowledge on dietary requirements. But local populations used the openness to discuss around malnutrition and poverty as an occasion to widen ‘space for contestation’ around rural policy decisions. Initially, critical discourses strategically questioned the ‘too rigid interpretation of well-intentioned national prescriptions by local authorities’. But eventually, those forms of often localised contestation culminated into a more fundamental questioning of Green Revolution policy principles. This evolution was not so much the result of a broad wave of explicit criticism at the macro level, it was rather the result of smaller forms of contestation by civil society and by farmers bypassing official policy guidelines.

Interestingly, these forms of localised resistance were very effective in bringing about a ‘fundamental change in the rural landscape’ once more. The phenomenon of non-cultivated land has become much scarcer although there are locations where large tracks of land remain entirely empty – probably because the land is too degraded. Multi-cropping has increasingly re-emerged as a standard, and no longer as an exception. In a number of locations, farmers no longer combine the ‘authorised’ crop types, but return to old practices of complex multi-cropping with a high diversity of crop and seed types. At the same time, however, they continue to cultivate certain market-oriented crop types that were introduced through agrarian modernisation policies. In marshlands, the reconfigurations are less profound, even though in several locations, increased diversity in cultivation practices can be noticed.

All there reconfigurations allow us to pose four fundamental sets of questions. Firstly, is the current reconfiguration of rural landscapes part of a ‘larger trend of calling into question of the green revolution orientation’ within Rwanda’s agrarian reform? Will farmers be allowed to regain autonomy within their farming systems in a structural way? And what will then be the future role of public interventions in the agrarian sector? Because indeed, a return to the past – with purely auto-subsistent family farming systems – is not viable in a context of increasing resource scarcity and land fragmentation. However, a fundamental revalorisation of farmers’ locally-embedded knowledge – in combination with scientific input that gives credit to farmers’ risk-mitigating orientation – would be a clear step forward. Rwanda could be a very interesting breeding ground for agro-ecological innovations adapted to smallholder farmers’ realities.

Secondly, does the current evolution towards more flexibility for farmers in their farming practices represent a broader political opening towards ‘taking peasants’ voices on board’? Or is this only a way to further safeguard the legitimacy of current elites to stay in power? It is interesting to see how problems in relation to food security, crop failure and food price inflation are more openly debated on national Rwandan media. However, it is often the local authorities who are blamed for the excesses of the system, while the overall structural problems of the Green Revolution policies – and the responsibilities of national authorities – remain hidden behind the surface. Thus, question remains whether the discussions will eventually touch upon the skewed power relations within the agrarian sector at large. As long as the voices from below are not truly considered, problems of poverty and malnutrition will continue to re-emerge and undermine Rwanda’s broader developmental process. They fuel discontent and resentment and might ultimately reach a point where renewed violence in this conflict-prone region is not excluded.

Thirdly, what impact did Green Revolution policies have upon overall ‘land distribution’? Over the past decade, a significant group of smallholder farmers – unable to keep to  official policy measures – have been driven out of the agricultural sector. They had to cede there land to authorities, or sell their land in times of emergency. The past decade of rural reforms has resulted in land concentration in the hands of fewer people. Also, many young people no longer find employment in the agricultural sector, while alternative employment opportunities remain scarce. How to engage with an increasing low-skilled labour force in an overpopulated country? How can these people find a decent way of living? And what tensions arise when a large group of people feels excluded from the so-called economic success story that Rwandan policy makers and international donors proclaim? Finally, what does the Rwandan case teach us more broadly?

International donors, and particularly the World Bank and the IMF, continue to laud the Rwandan experience as an exemplary case of post-conflict economic reconstruction. They continue to back up the story of a highly successful Green Revolution, despite striking evidence to the contrary. Their responsibility is huge, both in terms of financial support as well as in terms of ideological stubbornness. On the basis of the Rwandan ‘success story’, the World Bank and the IMF persist in selling neo-liberal policy packages as the panacea for Africa’s development. Eventually, this story is as much about Rwanda, as about global interests peddling a neo-liberal economic growth model under the flag of development assistance. It is time for the international community to turn the eye of criticism upon themselves.

An Ansoms is a long-standing ROAPE contributor. She has a PhD in Applied Economics and is a Professor in development studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Her focus is on natural resource conflicts and challenges for rural development in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

Featured Photograph: Rwanda has high population density and intense land cultivation (9 July, 2007).

Abolish Africa’s Sovereign Debtors’ Prisons Now

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ROAPE
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In a radical call for reform of the IMF’s pro-creditor and anti-growth approach to indebted countries in Africa, Ndongo Sylla and Peter Doyle argue that the continent has a choice to make. Creditors, using the IMF, must be stopped from forcing devastating output losses by imposing high primary surpluses.

By Ndongo Samba Sylla and Peter Doyle

Within a decade, just to keep up with the flow of new entrants into its labour markets, sub-Saharan Africa needs to create 20 million new jobs every year. This is a huge challenge. But it is also a thrilling opportunity—to harness the energy and creativity of all of Africa’s young.

However, after it reviews these issues in Africa, the IMF’s immediate message—literally in the same sentence—is to pivot to ‘budget cuts to secure debt sustainability!’

That is plain wrong. For Africa to meet its development objectives, the IMF must radically change its pro-creditor anti-growth approach to highly indebted/insolvent countries.

In particular, the IMF’s priority is that to support job-creating new debt, the first task is to pay old debt, even if doing so means cutting budgets and activity to pay off old creditors.

Sadly, the IMF persists in choosing these priorities despite the lessons to be learned about the failure of that strategy where it has been tried and fully implemented.

For example, Jamaica, in the past decade, has followed this IMF playbook. Its government was instructed by the IMF to run huge primary budget surpluses—meaning that tax revenue exceeds total public spending excluding interest payments—to pay down debt.

Unlike most, Jamaica stuck to those instructions long enough to see what the results were.

So what were the results?

Well, Jamaican public debt has fallen, from 140 percent of GDP a decade ago to 95 percent now. But under this old-debt-first IMF priority, jobs fell from 2009, barely regaining their 2009 level from 2016 and the country’s GDP per capita also declined.

This is all in stark contrast to similar countries, notably our fastest growing African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Botswana, Namibia, and Mauritius, where instead of falling, GDP per capita rose some 25-35 percent in the same global environment.

All that is no surprise. With resources thus directed to pay down old debt, Jamaica could not apply them to invest in hurricane protection and recovery, water management, or schools, or to reduce taxes to spur business.

The contrast with the fastest growing African countries show just how much output was forgone in Jamaica in pursuit of this old-debt-first approach—40 percent of 2009 Jamaican GDP. That is the order of magnitude of output foregone in Jamaica in just one decade.

Such output losses forced by creditors have happened before. In Victorian times, a tailor could be jailed by creditors when she defaulted. In jail, she made no dresses. The creditors didn’t care about that loss of output. They just turned the screws on her family to pay up.

We now regard all that as barbaric, and, over their violent opposition, personal insolvency laws have been changed to prevent creditors from disregarding output losses like that.

But creditors (including the Chinese), through the IMF, still do that to sovereign debtors.

And not just in Jamaica. The IMF right now is demanding high primary budget surpluses in the medium term including in Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, the Seychelles, Congo, and South Sudan—all to pay off old debts.

As Jamaica shows, that is a recipe for stagnation at best. The IMF is wrong to point the finger of blame at debtors for failing to exhibit enough commitment and energy to it. It is hardly the jailed tailor’s fault that she cannot produce!

Instead, the world and Africa have a choice to make. Because just as with individual insolvencies—where other arrangements were put in place to block creditor disregard for output foregone—it is perfectly technically feasible to install better insolvency arrangements for Sovereigns too.

We detail such alternative arrangements, what we call ‘A Pre-Emptive Sovereign Insolvency Regime’ (PSIR), which are constructed on the same basis as those which have applied to US banks for over half a century—through which many hundreds of banks have successfully been restructured. A fuller account of the proposal may be found here.

The key is that the IMF would force debt write downs when public debt ratios cannot be stabilized without raising the budget primary balance above 2 percent of GDP, not, as now, only when debt ratios rise unsustainably.

So old creditors would not be able to force output losses by imposing high primary surpluses via the IMF. But beneficiaries would have to fulfill other conditionality so as to secure the consequent growth and jobs dividend. On this basis, the IMF would finance the beneficiaries’ transition to new creditors.

Had these arrangements applied to Jamaica from 2009, its debt would have been written off to levels consistent with low primary surpluses. That would have allowed Jamaica to invest and grow in the past decade, just as our fastest growing African countries did, and just as Africa as a whole needs to do now, instead of just grinding down old debt.

Absent those arrangements, Jamaica had no choice but to conform. But it should not have been faced with that “choice”. Given the results, including spurring disorderly emigration, no other country should face that choice again.

The benefits of a PSIR go far beyond delivering the output potential of those countries which are highly indebted now. By removing their IMF ‘high primary balance backstop’, it mobilizes all creditors to press for substantive accountability and transparency up front, instead of colluding with corrupt and inept leaders to impose illegitimate and wasteful debt onto Africa’s poorest citizens. It would also slow capital inflows during commodity booms.

As with debtor-prison regimes of personal insolvency, only old creditors stand in the way of this output-boosting, job-creating, anti-corruption, and commodity-boom-smoothing reform. The 1987 warning by the late Thomas Sankara, the charismatic President of Burkina Faso, echoes more loudly than ever: ‘If we don’t repay [external debt], lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we repay, we are going to die. That is also for sure.’

It is time to choose. Is Africa to be subjected again to the debtors’ prison it endured with the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) in the 1980s and 1990s, being forced to raise primary surpluses to pay debt at the expense of output and decent jobs, or does Africa stand up to insist that Sovereign Insolvency Arrangements be brought out of the 19th and into the 21st Century, to make millions of new jobs per year possible?

The IMF’s founding mandate was to secure output, not debt. If Africa rescues that global body from the clutches of creditors by insisting on these reforms to the sovereign insolvency regime, Africa would bring the IMF back into compliance with its mandate. This would set the stage for the realization of the potential of all of our people.

Africa should call for the world and the IMF to abolish sovereign debtors’ prisons now.

Ndongo Samba Sylla is Research and Programme Manager for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He is the editor and author of a number of books including The Fair Trade Scandal. 

Peter Doyle is a former senior economist at the International Monetary Fund. He resigned in 2012 because of the Fund’s “incompetence” and failure to warn about the urgency of the global financial crisis.

Featured Photograph: Chinese President Xi Jinping with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the 2018 Beijing Summit of The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing, China (4 September 2018).

Climate Change and Rebellion: an interview with John Molyneux

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ROAPE
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In an interview with the socialist writer and activist, John Molyneux, ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig asks him about climate change, capitalism and socialist transformation. In an important initiative John has recently founded the Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) which brings together activists and researchers from across the Global North and South. The network hopes to amplify the socialist voice in the struggle against environmental crisis. Africa, he argues, is crucial to the fight against climate change.

Can you tell readers of roape.net about yourself? Your background, activism and politics.

I was born in Britain in 1948 and became a socialist activist and Marxist in 1968 through the struggle against the Vietnam War, the student revolt and May ’68 in Paris. I joined the International Socialists in June of that year. I have remained active ever since. From the mid- seventies onwards I began writing in the field of Marxist theory, publishing Marxism and the Party (1978) and What is the Real Marxist Tradition? (1983) and other books, pamphlets and articles. Since the late nineties I also started writing about art and have a book on The Dialectics of Art coming out later this year.

From 1975 to 2010 I was a teacher at various levels in the city of Portsmouth  – secondary school, further education and then in the School of Art at Portsmouth University. In 2010 I retired and moved to Dublin where I have continued to be an activist with People Before Profit and a writer, publishing books on Anarchism, the media, Marxist philosophy and Lenin for Today. I have also served as the founder and editor of the Irish Marxist Review.

Can you speak a little about your involvement in the climate change movement? As a long-standing socialist and activist, when did you first become seriously aware of climate change – what was it that impacted on you explicitly?

I don’t think there was any single moment. I think probably it was the socialist writer, Jonathan Neale, who first fully explained the issue to me somewhere around the turn of the century. Jonathan served for a period as Secretary of the Campaign to Stop Climate Change and I was involved in that campaign in a limited way. But I didn’t find that they were very receptive to my revolutionary socialist ideas.

However, from quite early on I was convinced that climate change was going to be an existential crisis for humanity because I was convinced that capitalism was not going to stop it. There were, of course, debates about this question. Many people thought there HAD to be a capitalist solution or at least a solution within capitalism because they thought overthrowing capitalism was out of the question. Others, including Marxists, engaged in hypothetical debates as to whether capitalism might, in theory, be able to deal with the issue.

My view was that regardless of what might theoretically be possible the actually existing capitalism we were dealing with was not going to stop climate change or even seriously try to stop it until it was too late. This was because capitalism is driven by profit and competitive accumulation at every level and because it is far too heavily invested in fossil fuels to simply switch to renewables. To those who say we can’t wait for your socialism, we need change NOW, my reply is I will fight alongside you for change, but I don’t believe we can wait for capitalism to go green, it’s simply not going to happen. I hope I’m wrong but so far, I’ve been right.

I always understood how disastrous climate change was going to be but at first I thought of it as something fairly far in the future – by the end of the century etc – and probably outside my life time. But it has become clearer and clearer that even the IPCCs (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predictions are too conservative and that the beginnings of climate catastrophe are with us already.

Recently, specifically last year – with the extraordinary global protests of school students and many others – the climate emergency has broken onto the world stage, leaving us all forever changed. Can you discuss how you interpreted this movement and its significance, and any weaknesses you see?

The school strikes for climate were unequivocally magnificent and hats off to Greta Thunberg and everyone else involved. It was wonderful to see young people stepping forward and on such a global scale. The civil disobedience organised by Extinction Rebellion, especially in the first London Rebellion Week, was also a fantastic step forward. Every socialist should enthusiastically back them and constructively engage with them.  I haven’t much time for leftists who dismiss radicalising young people because of their lack of ‘the correct programme’ or base in ‘the organised working class’.

But of course, these movements, like every emergent mass movement, have weaknesses. In particular it is a weakness that they tend to think of themselves as ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ politics and therefore often discourage political debate. In my opinion every aspect of climate change and the environmental crisis is intensely political and some political forces (largely those on the serious or ‘hard’ left) are friends of the planet and the climate movement and others (the right and far right) are its enemies. Without fetishizing the figure of 3.5% [XR thinks that mobilising 3.5% of the population is necessary to secure ‘system change’] I think XR’s aim to mobilize those sort of mass numbers is excellent but I’m not sure that all their methods of organising are conducive to achieving this.

You have just initiated the Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) bringing together activists and researchers from across the Global North and South. Can you explain what you hope to achieve?

The developing climate emergency has generated much increased public awareness of climate change and the environment generally and a new wave of activism which many socialists are part of and engaging positively with. However, the current environmental discourse – internationally – both in terms of the media and most of the public is dominated by what could be called ‘green liberalism’. A more radical version of green liberalism is also prevalent among activists along with a vague ‘deep green’ consciousness. This goes together with an understanding of system change as essentially a change in collective mind set which lends itself to illusions in the possibility of converting corporations and mainstream politicians and the State.

At the moment the socialist voice in the movement is very limited, certainly not dominant. But the socialist voice is essential because capitalism is not going resolve either the climate change issue or the wider environmental crisis. Socialist transformation of society is objectively necessary. Moreover a socialist approach is crucial to winning over and mobilizing the mass of working class people. Unfortunately, in this extremely urgent situation much of the international revolutionary left is very weak.

Our network is an attempt in a small way to improve this situation, to amplify the socialist voice and reach out to new forces. Its initial aim is to bring ecosocialists together to facilitate the exchange and propagation of socialist environmentalist ideas along with reports on the development of the crisis and resistance from around the world. Later it may be able to hold conferences and issue calls for action.

Marx’s ‘ecological writings’ have been fairly recently written about by writers like John Bellamy Foster, and others. Can you explain why a structural challenge to capitalism is essential, and how Marxism can help in this challenge?

First, I think we should acknowledge the enormously important intellectual work done by John Bellamy Foster and his collaborators such as Paul Burkett and Ian Angus. There was a widespread interpretation, including among Marxists, of Marx as ‘productionist’ and a ‘super industrialiser’ and therefore anti-environmentalist. They demolished this myth. Speaking personally I owe a considerable debt to John Bellamy Foster for his book Marx’s Ecology. When I read it after more than 30 years as a Marxist it substantially transformed and deepened my understanding of Marxism. The concept of the ‘metabolic rift’ is hugely important. I’m very proud that he is a sponsor of GEN. Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene – he’s another sponsor – is also brilliant.

I have already explained above the essential reason why we need a structural challenge to capitalism but this applies at every level. Production for profit is inherently destructive of nature whether we are talking about the dumping of toxic waste round the corner from where I live, to the plastic choking the oceans, to the deadly pollution of the air – all the way to the overarching challenge of climate change.

What is more capitalism will ensure that the response to climate disasters which it is generating will be callous, cruel, class based and racist. This has been demonstrated time and again from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to the fires in Australia. We need to challenge capitalist priorities, structures and the system as a whole, not only to stop environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change but also to deal with its effects.

ROAPE, a radical review and website on political economy, focuses on Africa. Unfortunately, we have not covered the climate emergency in enough detail recently. The mobilisations last year were weak across the continent, as inspiring as they were. What role does Africa have to play in the struggle against climate change and how do you see the Global Ecosocialist Network helping?

Africa is absolutely crucial to the struggle against climate change. In terms of immediate effects Africa will almost certainly be the worst hit part of the world. The drought in Southern and Eastern Africa is already truly deadly and the extent of poverty in Africa will magnify the consequences of every climate disaster and extreme weather event. That this comes on top of the fact that Africa, as a whole, has the lowest per capita carbon footprint of any continent makes Africa the litmus test of any verbal commitment to climate justice.

Moreover the racist hierarchy of death in the world will ensure that hundreds or thousands of lives lost in central or eastern Africa will be less reported and count for less in terms of Western consciousness than five or ten lives lost in California or Australia.

Mass mobilizations in Africa linked to demands for climate justice would be the best possible antidote to this state of affairs.

It is therefore a key task of the Global Ecosocialist Network to do what it can to rectify the disgraceful neglect of the situation in Africa and to stimulate radical resistance in the African continent.

We are very pleased that Africa is well represented among our initial sponsors and we have already published an excellent article on the terrible situation in Southern and Eastern Africa by Rehad Desai, the South African radical film maker, who is also a member of the Network’s Interim Steering Committee.

What are the immediate tasks for the network, and how do we expand it?

The most immediate task is to expand the readership of the website and the membership of the Network both through individuals joining and organisations affiliating. For this we need our existing members and supporters to actively promote GEN and recruit to it. Here it is important to stress that joining GEN is ‘commitment light’: it does not entail any major obligations in terms of activity, nor does it impinge on any individual’s or organisation’s existing political practice.

If in the next period we can gain enough members and resources – we have no external funding whatsoever – we can move to the next stage of convening some kind of international meeting or conference. Hopefully this would enable us to put the Network on a sounder democratic footing than it has at present – obviously doing this on a global basis presents certain problems e.g.  anywhere such a meeting is convened, be it Rio or Paris, Cape Town, Lagos, Mumbai or Sydney, will be much harder for some comrades to reach than others. Possibly down the line we can develop multiple regional foci or centres. The holding of the Cop 26 Conference in Glasgow in November may also serve as a focus for us.

Meanwhile any support ROAPE can give us in terms of written input to the website, publicity, individual membership and organisational affiliation will be most welcome.

John Molyneux is a socialist, writer and activist and editor of Irish Marxist Review. John is also a founder of the Global Ecosocialist Network.

From Johannesburg to London: student-worker struggles

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ROAPE
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In 2015 and 2016 students at South African universities campaigned under the banner #FeesMustFall for the abolition of tuition fees. Little public attention however has been paid to the alliances of students and workers in parallel #EndOutsourcing campaigns for fair labour practices for all university workers. Heike Becker asks what were the trajectories of the student-worker movements for insourcing of all workers at public institutions of higher learning? And what did they have in common with similar campaigns that arose at the same time at universities in the United Kingdom?

By Heike Becker

In early October 2015, just days before the massive #FeesMustFall student protests hit South African higher education campuses, the Oct6 movement (named after October 6, the day the activist group presented its manifesto) raised concern about the conditions of ‘support staff’ such as cleaners, security staff, and maintenance workers in the public university run on corporate principles in the contemporary era of neoliberalism. Protest action focused on the University of the Witwatersrand (‘Wits’) in Johannesburg. The signatories of the group’s manifesto included student activists, radical academics and labour activists from universities in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Their  call to action was against the outsourcing practices that marginalised the most vulnerable university workers. The manifesto argued that, ‘while some progressive gains have been made in the post-apartheid period, South African universities have slid into more conservative practices. One of the most serious instances of this conservatism has been the treatment of university workers. The mass outsourcing of university workers to private companies since 1999 is a blight on the record of post-apartheid universities.’

Next to the issue of tuition fees the labour conditions of the low-paid workers providing auxiliary services have become a key issue of contention at South African universities. The outsourcing of functions to private companies has typically meant that workers, who were previously directly employed by the universities, had to take a cut in their already meagre earnings; they also lost social benefits, including pension funds and tuition fees rebates for their own and family members’ university studies. South Africa’s student protesters carried #EndOutsourcing banners along with their #FeesMustFall demands. Concerned academics entered, sometimes heated, disputes with university managers. Workers went on strike to demand better labour conditions.

These are not just South African concerns. Similar conflicts have been fought over at British universities. In both countries, protests revolved around the exceedingly low salaries – and lack of social security benefits – paid by contracting companies to outsourced workers. There is more at issue though. In London as much as in Johannesburg and Cape Town battle lines have been drawn between workers, contracting companies and university managements. They have been fought by new alliances of workers, students and academics. In some places they have seen the rise to prominence of newly invigorated, independent labour unions. A particularly strong example of this is the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IGWB), a young union, established in 2012 that mostly organises transnational migrants who work in Britain under precarious labour conditions. The IGWB broke away from the established trade union, which the immigrant labour activists felt did not properly represent their constituency. In their campaigns they employ vigorous, colourful and noisy forms of activism instead of the conventional and conservative tactics of the established union representatives.

Students and critical academics have further raised concerns about the practices of corporatized academia and deepening inequalities in the neoliberal Global South and North. In South Africa as in Britain the struggles for insourcing have involved arguments between academics and senior academic management (some of them with leftist credentials) about the core spirit, social and political responsibility of the university. What the Oct6 activists from Johannesburg and Cape Town wrote, captures the hardening battle lines from the Cape to the Thames: ‘The raw inequality of campus life is a sign of a deeply undemocratic system. Universities cannot imagine that they can serve as the cultivators of future democracy in South Africa if their own terms are saturated by such inequality. It provides a tacit education to all who learn at our universities that such inequality is an acceptable feature of our society. If we cannot sustain a practice of equality in our universities, how are we to expect other institutions to work against inequality in the most unequal country on earth?’

In this blogpost I show the different trajectories of movements for insourcing of all workers at public institutions of higher learning through recent examples from South Africa, with a focus on Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg and the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, as well as the University of London in the United Kingdom. What are the common aims of these struggles, and how successful have they been?

South Africa: student-worker alliances

In South African universities outsourcing of auxiliary services was introduced some years into the post-apartheid era. On the cusp of the 21st century, the country’s universities privatised cleaning, catering, and grounds maintenance, that is gardening and other tasks to keep university campuses in good shape. Interestingly, both of the country’s leading ‘liberal’ universities, Wits and the University of Cape Town (UCT) were led by vice-chancellors of impeccable leftist credentials when they introduced outsourcing. Wits vice-chancellor in 2000 was the historian Colin Bundy who had been instrumental in the production of revisionist South African history from both Marxist and Africanist perspectives, while UCT’s principal in 1999 was Mamphela Ramphele, physician and anthropologist, and a prominent formerly banned activist of the Black Consciousness movement. That South Africa’s leading universities turned to such problematic labour practices while under the watch of former activist-academics leaves no uncertainty about the pervasiveness of the neoliberal turns the country took soon after the end of formal apartheid.

Typically, outsourcing resulted in massive job losses and drop in wages. When Wits handed over cleaning, catering and grounds maintenance to private companies in 2000, more than 600 workers were retrenched and only about 250 were re-employed by private companies.

Outsourcing was accompanied by drastic attacks on wages and conditions: typically, cleaners’ wages dropped by almost 50 per cent, without social security benefits such as medical aid, maternity benefits, or pensions, a report on labour conditions at the university said in 2011.[1]

The 2011 report concludes that outsourcing ‘reproduce[d] the apartheid legacy at Wits and continues to do so to this day.’The contracts that workers have signed with private companies since 2000 allow the university ‘to absolve itself of any responsibility for workers.’

Wits stood out among the South African universities with a continuous history of worker activism around the labour conditions in the corporate university. In 2013, for instance, workers went on an industrial campaign to protect their jobs when new sub-contractors took over the provision of auxiliary services at the university.[2]

While the university executive mostly washed their hands of the conditions under which the lowly-paid support staff worked, the institution’s new vice-chancellor Adam Habib – a political scientist and former anti-apartheid activist – claims that already early in his term, in 2013, he told the university governance structures, such as Senate and Council in no uncertain terms that he regarded outsourcing as a violation of human rights.[3] Habib claims that the battles over insourcing were never between advocates and opponents of outsourcing, and that he personally had stated unequivocally at the time that he did not ‘need to be convinced that outsourcing exploits vulnerable workers and needs to be changed.’[4]  However, and that became the major bone of contention of the next few years, at Wits as at other institutions, he also took the line that insourcing would come at a significant financial cost, and that it was crucial that insourcing would not compromise the university finances. Hence, the point was whether ‘institutional stakeholders were prepared to pay the costs associated with advancing the human rights obligation.’[5]

Habib’s stance was indicative of the attitude of university executives. However, as he freely admits, the student and worker protests of 2015 changed the terms of the debate. The dispute was no longer over whether to insource or not, but the only issue now was, how to do it. He comments: ‘In this sense, the student and worker protests were essential for enabling change. They demonstrated the power of social mobilisation in opening up the systemic parameters of what was possible.’[6]

Following student and worker protests in late 2015, at Wits a ‘task team’ of university executive management, workers’ and academics’ representatives as well as student activists developed and implemented a two-step plan. Starting from the introduction of a top-up allowance – to be paid to the sub-contracting companies to ensure a minimum wage (initially R 4,500 from January 2016). In June 2016 the task team made a detailed recommendation on the insourcing of workers in catering, cleaning, grounds, waste and security, and drivers of Wits branded buses. Insourcing was to happen by January 2017, ‘provided that this coincided with concluding contracts with service providers – or that these contracts could be terminated early without cost to the university.’[7] Negotiations with the companies that provided the auxiliary services were tricky. However, by mid-2017, about one and a half thousand Wits catering, cleaning, grounds, waste and security staff were insourced at a minimum salary R 7,800, and officially welcomed back into the university community with ‘a bit of fanfare’, as Habib writes.[8]

Wits presents a success story when it comes to the implementation of reasonably fair labour practices. However, Habib’s account as he tells it in his personal reflection on the #FeesMustFall battles, is also ripe with dismissive, even aggressive retorts at student and worker activists, who were the most active proponents of the campaign to bring all university workers back in house. His most venomous invectives he reserves for the academics who pushed hard for insourcing. He dubs those Wits academics who supported the students’ and workers’ struggles as the ‘far-left’, or with even more rancour, the ‘Pol Pot brigade’.[9]

One of the academics who seems to have earned the Wits principal’s wrath was the anthropologist and senior humanities professor Eric Worby, who consistently spoke out about the importance of a university such as Wits meeting its human rights obligations by ridding itself of outsourcing. Habib expresses his clear contempt that ‘very few of the activists ever wanted to confront the choices and trade-offs we had to make.’[10] He, like other senior university executives also kept an authoritarian stance. Typically, riot police and, increasingly, private security companies were brought on to the campuses, and student and worker protesters were warned that no ‘disruption’ would be tolerated and that anyone involved would be suspended and banned from the campus.[11]

Nonetheless, the recent insourcing trajectories at South Africa’s comparatively wealthy formerly ‘White’ universities such as Wits and UCT appear to have been rather smooth. Similar to the developments at Wits, at UCT an agreement that committed the university to insourcing was signed between the vice-chancellor and the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) on 28 October 2015, and by mid-2017 most UCT workers were back on the institution’s payroll.

Universities such as Wits and UCT had comparatively smooth routes to getting workers back on the institutions’ payroll, other universities however were more disinclined. The University of the Western Cape (UWC), where I teach, is one institution where until today the auxiliary services are outsourced to several sub-contracting companies. This is in spite of the fact that at UWC as on other campuses insourcing was a demand of the student protests from October 2015, and outsourced workers have recurrently come out on protests about their labour conditions and reiterated the strident demands to be brought back into direct employment by the university. In February 2016 this took a particularly militant form when about 100 workers, mostly cleaners, tipped over bins and threw litter over the campus.

UWC’s executive management initially responded with a R 2,000 monthly salary top-up from December 2015 and offered that those working on the campus in the employment of sub-contractors would receive the same study benefits for themselves and their children as those directly employed by the university, that is, tuition-free undergraduate enrolment and a 75% rebate for postgraduate studies. However, during meetings with the protesting workers and in public pronouncements the UWC executive management repeatedly claimed that this was the best they could do, and that insourcing of the outsourced workers was impossible since this would compromise the financial sustainability of the university. In early 2017 the UWC spokesperson said that the university could not bring 600 outsourced workers onto the staff ‘without facing retrenchments and possible bankruptcy.’[12]

There is some truth in this. Insourcing, despite different cost estimates presented by South African institutions, would be costly, especially in the transition. Unlike the leading historically white universities, UWC, founded by the apartheid government in 1960 as a university for ‘coloured’ (mixed-race) students, cannot rely on private endowments bequeathed by wealthy alumni or corporate investments to subsidise the costs of insourcing. While UWC is today among South Africa’s leading research universities, the institution remains financially vulnerable.

Yet, a number of outsourced workers at UWC faced a particular hardship when 143 workers employed by one of the six companies that provide the auxiliary services, were dismissed in January 2017. When due to the student protests the campus was shut down in October 2016 they had stayed home until the university re-opened a month later. The company, SECURITAS, which provides security services to the university, claimed that they had been absent from work without permission. In March 2017 the case was heard at the CCMA (Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration) but no resolution was found. The case of the 143 dismissed workers has been raised through repeated labour action, and most recently an online petition in November 2018 that demanded their re-instatement and an end to outsourcing. The petition appealed to the university’s responsibility for its workers.

The petition used strong language, accusing sub-contracting companies of paying ‘slave wages’; it claimed that not even a quarter of what the university pays the company is spent in salaries for its employees. Outsourcing was described as an ‘evil system’ and ‘modern-day slavery.’ The petition concluded that, ‘the fight to end outsourcing is the fight to end slavery and promote human dignity.’[13]

The cries for human dignity provide a significant moment that links the struggles in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London.

London: struggles of precarious workers       

Struggles to end outsourcing at universities are not confined to South Africa. Between September 2017 and May 2019 there have been 17 days of strike action at the University of London (UoL), where cleaners and security staff, most of them of a migrant background, began a campaign to end outsourcing in September 2017.[14]

As in South Africa, the wages of outsourced workers at British universities – employed by subcontracting service providers – are generally much lower than those of their colleagues who are directly employed by the university. They are also discriminated against in terms of social security benefits.

The strikes have been coordinated by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IGWB), which has called on the university to end outsourcing, implement pay rises, and stop the bullying on racist, sexist and homophobic grounds of migrant workers and especially women who work for outsourcing companies. The IWGB is a new union, founded in August 2012, which represents mainly low paid migrant workers. The union represents sections of the workforce which have traditionally been non-unionised and under-represented, such as the UoL’s outsourced cleaners and security guards, as well as workers in the so-called ‘gig economy’, such as bicycle couriers and Uber drivers.

Labour action for insourcing at UoL has included vibrant, creative and noisy picket lines, protest marches, and interventions during university functions. The university authorities however did not back down; instead almost half a million pounds were spent on additional security over two months in 2018 to police the industrial action and student protests that took place in solidarity with them. In the strike on 30 October 2018, the University even used bailiffs with handcuffs and extendable batons in an attempt to intimidate workers, students and academic protesters.

Following on these events, in December 2018 the IWGB called for a boycott of Senate House, the administrative centre of the university. The union asked academics, public figures and organisations to pledge ‘to not attend or organise any events at the University of London central administration (… ) until all outsourced workers (including cleaners, receptionists, security officers, catering staff, porters, audio-visual workers, gardeners and maintenance workers) are made direct employees of the University of London on equal terms and conditions with other directly employed staff.’ IWGB organiser at the UoL, Jordi López, said that this campaign was particularly significant, the IWGB and campaign organisers believed, since it would help to achieve victory at the epicentre of London’s academic hub, which would ‘sound the death knell for outsourcing in the sector.’[16]

By August 2019 the pledge had been signed by more than 400 academics, politicians (including the shadow chancellor John McDonnell and five other MPs), public figures (including veteran film maker Ken Loach) and 23 branches of the University and College Union (UCU), the leading British union of academics and academic-related staff. In May 2019 the national congress of the UCU officially voted to support the campaign. With arguments echoing the South African OCT6 manifesto, Christiane Paine who moved the motion at the UCU congress, said: ‘I believe that inequality is legitimised by precarious work… Universities should aspire [to be] institutisons where every worker has the same terms and conditions.’[17]

As a result of the boycott, over 180 Senate House events were relocated. However, the campaign has not been without controversy. In one rather bizarre spat in February 2019, for instance, leading academics stood accused of undermining a protest about workers’ rights when the boycott was broken in order to give a talk about a historian famous for his support of workers’ rights.

Richard Evans, emeritus professor of history at Cambridge University launched his new biography of the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm at the UoL Senate House, thus breaking the boycott advocating better employment conditions for outsourced staff.[18]

Evans expressed his support for the cause of the protesters in a letter to The Guardian newspaper and wrote that he had taken a bundle of leaflets distributed by the boycott campaign into the meeting for the audience to read. He argued that, ‘this was a far better way of publicising their cause than cancelling the meeting and sending 150 people home disappointed.’[19]

Yet, he argued against the boycott in even more strident terms, accusing it of ‘sectarianism.’ He even called on the late Marxist historian for support (‘I don’t think Eric Hobsbawm would have approved of the boycott’) and expressed his disapproval of the IWGB, whose credentials he doubted since it is not affiliated with the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the national federation of trade unions in England and Wales. He claimed that, the fact that the IWGB union split from the established unions representing workers at the university to operate independently would have struck the Marxist historian as undermining the trade union movement.

The UoL branch chairwoman of the IWGB union, Maritza Castillo Calle, doubted this and in turn claimed ‘that we are sure [Hobsbawm] would be on our side in this struggle.’[20]

A member of the London Socialist Historians Group responded to this skirmish over the late historian’s possible standpoint with a rather laconic comment: ‘What would Eric Hobsbawm have done? As a Marxist I am a materialist so can only note that he is no longer available to tell us.’ However he argued that he maintained that it was ‘a basic act of solidarity’ not to hold events during the boycott campaign since it was not for the academics to prescribe to the workers how to wage their struggles; rather they should accept that it was up to the outsourced workers and the union they choose to represent them to determine strategy.[21]

Opponents to the boycott repeatedly pointed to the fact that the insourcing process was already under way. In response to the UCU Congress resolution in May 2019, a university spokesperson, for instance, emphasised that the remainder of the process had been agreed with the recognised unions – including UCU and the public service union Unison, thus excluding IGWB, which the university does not consider a ‘recognised union’. Reminiscent of the South African responses, the UoL spokesperson further raised an authoritative, if not authoritarian, voice claiming that, ‘Staff at Senate House have been subject to intimidation and abuse online in relation to the boycott which is completely unacceptable.’[22]

The IWGB has not entirely questioned that progress has been made but pointed out that the process was very slow and that maintenance workers, cleaners and catering staff would remain outsourced at least until the current contract with service providers are up for tender again, some only in 2021. The union maintains that thus the university’s handling of their policy around insourcing has been twofaced.

While campaigns for insourcing have been particularly effervescent during the past two years, they go back even longer. The beginnings of the struggles in London have been told, with some creative license, by the activist, academic and novelist Leo Zeilig in his novel, An Ounce of Practice. Published in 2017, this is, in part, an account of a strike and campaign for justice of a group of mostly Zimbabwean workers on a campus in London. It also shows their disappointment with the officially recognized trade union and their resolve to carry on despite the discouraging stance of union officials. While the real-live workers and activists are mostly immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean rather than from southern Africa, the author who witnessed the earlier battles when he worked as a researcher at the University of London has been engaged ever since with the struggles of workers of migrant background who are ‘so often invisible, patronised, abused.’

In a scene in An Ounce, an unofficial strike is in its second day, and a union official named Terry turns up to tell the workers they must return to their posts. He is shouted down by Tendai, one of the main organisers of the strike. It is worthwhile to read this longer excerpt from the novel:

Terry blustered again. ‘Management have told me if we don’t clear the car park and move away from the main entrance they will be forced to call the police, who may make arrests. I don’t know your individual circumstances, but they will check papers. As you are on an illegal strike, your union can’t support you.’

A woman screamed from the back: ‘Bastard. Go back to Mummy or we’ll spank you!’

Terry turned to Tendai, his eyes wide, his lips puckered and tensed. Tendai raised his arms in a slow, dramatic shrug. There was a cheer. Tendai’s locks flowed over his shoulders; his coat was too small, the sleeves above his wrists; a silver chain was visible on his open neck; his taut body, stripped of fat, stood tall. When the cheering subsided the same woman jeered affectionately and called out, ‘It’s Jesus. It’s the black messiah!’

Tendai’s insolent, drawn face was serious. He shook his head and spoke in English: ‘This man says we must return to our jobs, to the insults. He says if we don’t, the police will come and arrest us and send some of us home. The union won’t fight for us.’ Tendai paused, then spoke more loudly. ‘I say that we are the union, and if we fight then the union is with us!’ There was another cheer. Tendai’s voice carried over the heads of the strikers to the offices and departments above the car park. ‘There are no foreigners here except the bosses.’

That was the end of it. Terry was jostled from his place and the crowd rejoiced as though they had already won. They embraced each other, linked arms, kissed. Then they marched around the university singing in Spanish, Polish and Shona – exclaiming, encumbering the streets, the road filled with their bodies. [23]

The novel follows the strike and the lives of the workers over several weeks. Then the action shifts to Zimbabwe…

Outsourcing, struggle, and the corporate university

When the insourcing battles in London resurged in 2017, Zeilig commented that in his novel he had ‘attempted to create a cast of Zimbabwean migrants at the centre of labour protest in London, who were once active in the movement against Mugabe’s dictatorship. An Ounce of Practice is a story about the connections of the Global North and South, the link between how we live, love and struggle.’

The struggles of university workers connect Cape Town, Johannesburg and London in a number of ways. In both the Global South and North institutions of higher education have become ‘Thatcher-ite’ corporate businesses, even though the University of London, Wits, and UWC are all public institutions. The universities’ decisions to outsource auxiliary services were rationalised with the argument that this would allow them to focus on their ‘core functions’ of teaching and research. In reality, it meant that universities added to inequality and social injustice by chucking out their most vulnerable workers into working under conditions of super-exploitation without the social security benefits they grant those directly employed, such as pension funds, health insurance etc.

The worker protests also demonstrate the importance of new forms of labour struggles and organisation. In South Africa, it was the student and worker struggles that forcefully put insourcing on the agenda in 2015-16. The established trade union NEHAWU did not play a significant role on most campuses. At Wits, the insourcing process was agitated and negotiated by a student-worker alliance under the #EndOutsourcing and #FeesMustFall banners, with substantial support from radical academics. After they were employed directly by the university, the vast majority of the workers joined the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) that had broken away from the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).[24] At UWC, too, strident demands for insourcing were raised during the student and worker protests in late 2015. For several reasons, though, at UWC they did not succeed. Unlike at Wits (or the historically white, comparatively wealthy UCT twenty kilometres down the road), UWC’s executive management was adamantly opposed to an agreement to bring workers onto the university’s payroll. This was, partly, due to the historically black institution’s lack of financial resources. Also, the UWC struggles received less public support and media attention than those at the formerly white universities, and there was comparatively little support by UWC academics, except for a rather marginal informal network of some ‘concerned academics.’

In London, the ongoing struggle has been led by a new kind of union, IWGB, which has taken up the organisation of formerly non-unionised sections of the workforce, especially immigrants employed in the most vulnerable, unprotected and low-paid jobs. The young union has thus introduced new politics of workers’ struggles; it has also made its mark with new aesthetics of struggles, known for the vibrancy of salsa and the noisy blowing of vuvuzelas (the plastic horns that achieved global prominence during the 2010 football world cup in South Africa) on their picket lines. It has also garnered substantial support among academics and public figures.

To sum up: the struggles for insourcing of all workers at universities in South Africa and Britain points to global connections of neoliberal university governance. It equally indicates however new forms of workers’ struggles emerging from below, and hopefully connecting those fighting for social justice and progressive academic practices in the Global South and North.

It is interesting indeed that similar battles for fair labour practices on university campuses have been fought at academic institutions in both the Global South and the North. The bottom-line is the precarious situation that the workers find themselves in. Irrespective of whether they work for a university in London, Cape Town or Johannesburg, cleaners, security personnel and other auxiliary labourers receive poor pay and, importantly, are deprived of the employment benefits such as pensions and other social security payments because their labour has been ‘casualized’.

The battles for insourcing have been successful to varying degrees, as the discussion of the two South African cases exemplifies. After a long and hard struggle the IGWB won in October last year an important concession for university workers in London although the boycott campaign has not yet been called off.[25] It appears, sadly, that it is the least affluent and well-resourced academic institutions attended mostly by students from black working-class families, such as UWC, that are particularly prone to perpetuate the conservative labour practices of the neoliberal age.

Heike Becker teaches social and cultural anthropology at UWC in South Africa. Her work explores themes at the interface between culture and politics and focuses particularly on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.

Featured Photograph: Students and workers unite at UCT to end outsourcing in 2015.

A version of this article was published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Southern Africa.

Notes

[1] Nkosi, Bongani; ‘”Abused” workers at their Wits’ end’; Mail & Guardian, 28 October 2011.

[2] Nkosi, Bongani; ‘Wits workers prepare for more strikes’; Mail & Guardian, 31 May 2013.

[3] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 77

[4] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 77

[5] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 77

[6] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 77

[7] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 82.

[8] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 83

[9] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 24.

[10] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 49.

[11] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 67.

[12] Furlong, Ashleigh, ‘Insourcing at universities: uneven progress; GroundUp, 14 March 2017.

[13] vernac.news.com 22 November 2018.

[14] Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott  over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019

[16] Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.

[17] Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.

[18] Rawlinson, Kevin. Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers’ rights boycott, The Guardian, 7 February 2019.

[19] Evans, Richard J. Eric Hobsbawm would not have backed University of London boycott, The Guardian, 11 February 2019.

[20] Rawlinson, Kevin. Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers’ rights boycott, The Guardian, 7 February 2019.

[21] Flett, Keith. Richard Evans should have cancelled his book launch at Senate House, The Guardian, 13 February 2019.

[22] Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.

[23] Zeilig, Leo. 2017. An Ounce of Practice. London: hoperoad; pp. 188-189.

[24] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 89.

[25] ‘Major concession won – boycott continues until full victory’; email sent by Jordi Lopez to Boycott Senate House mailing list, 18 October 2019.

On the Shoulders of Giants

By
ROAPE
-

In a celebration of Andre Gunder Frank and Walter Rodney, David Seddon looks at two men who have had a profound influence on generations of activists and researchers. Gunder Frank regarded underdevelopment in the Third World as a direct consequence of the development of Western capitalism. While Rodney followed some of the arguments of Gunder Frank and described how Africa had been exploited by European imperialism leading directly to the underdevelopment of most of the continent.

By David Seddon

Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005)

Half a century ago, a young economist of German origin called Andre Gunder Frank was studying for his PhD at the University of Chicago with Milton Friedman, the doyen of neo-classical economics and advocate of ‘free markets’ as the basis for economic development and social progress. Frank gained his PhD in 1957, with a thesis on agriculture in the Soviet Union, but by now he had effectively rejected the teachings of his professor and was beginning to develop his own theoretical position.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Frank taught in the United States, but in 1962, he moved to Latin America and taught at a number of universities there, including the University of Chile where he settled in 1967, and eventually became involved in the reforms undertaken by the government of Salvador Allende, who had, in 1970, become the first ever Marxist to be elected president in a democratic state. Even before his direct involvement with Allende’s government, however, he had married a Chilean left activist, Marta Fuentes, and had taken a significant move to the left, politically as well as theoretically.

In 1966, the radical American journal, the Monthly Review Press, published an essay by Frank on ‘The Development of Underdevelopment’. In this essay, he argued that contrary to mainstream development economics, which suggested that the poverty and underdevelopment of so much of Latin America, Asia and especially Africa was due to ‘backwardness’ and a lack of integration into the world capitalist economy, in reality, most of what was now becoming known as ‘the Third World’ had in fact been integrated into the world capitalist economy for centuries, through imperialism and colonization, and consequently underdevelopment in the Third World was, in fact, a direct consequence of the development of Western capitalism.

This was heresy, as far as mainstream economists were concerned. But his ideas were not only in contradiction to conventional economics, they were contrary to the views of those who guided US foreign policy and development ‘aid’ at the height of the Cold War. In fact, Frank explicitly criticized W. W. Rostow for his view – the conventional wisdom at the time – that, if the countries of the Third World were to ‘develop’ they would have to be transformed from ‘traditional’ economies and societies based largely on subsistence agriculture into ‘modern’ economies and societies, by a process of capital investment and technology transfer, largely from outside. In other words, that ‘backward’ countries could only develop through a process of capitalist investment and development, generated through greater integration in the Western-dominated capitalist world system.[1]

Frank’s essay on ‘The Development of Underdevelopment’ was followed in 1967 by a more substantial work, based on detailed studies of Chile and Brazil, titled Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. This in turn was followed in 1969 by Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution. Both books were published by the Monthly Review Press. By now, Frank was committed, not just to a distinctive theoretical position as regards the development of underdevelopment, but also to a political agenda that was explicitly revolutionary. The only way, he argued, to have any hope of socialist development, the countries of the Third World would have to break free of the relationship with Western capitalism that ensured they remained subordinate, peripheral and underdeveloped.

In this, he shared the vision of V. I. Lenin, as expressed in his 1916 work on Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism, which describes the function of financial capital in generating profits from imperialist colonialism as the final stage of Western capitalist development. But Frank shared not only the economic vision of Lenin but also his belief that socialism could be constructed after a political revolution, even in a relatively backward capitalist country (like Russia or Chile). He and his wife supported the government of Salvador Allende until its military overthrow by the military in a coup d’état backed by the CIA which led to the death of Allende. In 1976, Frank wrote a bitter critique of ‘the Chicago Boys’ – the Chilean economists who advised General Pinochet, who replaced Allende and instituted a programme of economic austerity and privatization along the lines advocated by Milton Friedman – called ‘Economic Genocide in Chile: Open Letter to Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger’.

Frank and his wife left Chile after the downfall of the Allende regime and over the next few years he took various academic positions, including that of Professor of Social Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA).[2] In this period, he managed to write several major and highly influential works, including World Accumulation: 1492 to 1789 (1978), Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (1979), Crisis: in the Word Economy (1981), Crisis: in the Third World (1981) and Reflections on the World Economic Crisis (1981). Labelled variously a ‘neo-Marxist’ and a ‘dependency theorist’, Frank increasingly became associated with what came to be called the World Systems theorists, who included heavy-weights Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein, with whom he wrote Dynamics of Global Crisis in 1982.

Walter Rodney (1942-1980)

In 1966, the same year that Andre Gunder Frank published his essay on ‘The Development of Underdevelopment’, Walter Anthony Rodney, a Guyanese by birth, who had graduated from University College of the West Indies (UCWI) in Jamaica in 1963 with a first-class degree in History, earned a PhD in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, at the age of 24. His dissertation, which focused on the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast, was published by the Oxford University Press in 1970 under the title A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 and was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the topic.

Rodney subsequently travelled widely and became well known internationally as an activist, scholar and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1966-67 and then returned to his alma mater, the University of the West Indies. While there, he expressed criticism of the middle class for its role in the post-Independence Caribbean. Rodney became an out-spoken critic of capitalism and argued for socialist development. In October 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney persona non grata. The decision to ban him from Jamaica and his subsequent dismissal by the University of the West Indies gave rise to protests by students and the poor of Kingston which escalated into a riot, known as the Rodney Riots, resulting in six deaths and causing millions of dollars in damages. The riots triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, as documented in Rodney’s The Groundings with my Brothers (published by Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications in 1969).

In 1969, Rodney returned to the University of Dar es Salaam, where he served as a teacher of History until 1974. In 1972, his major work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) was published. In it, he followed very much the argument of Andre Gunder Frank and described how Africa had been exploited by European imperialism, taking the form in many cases of colonial settlement and occupation, leading directly to the underdevelopment of most of the continent. But he also considered the dynamic of the relations of production and transformation of class structures within African societies. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial: it was ground-breaking in that it was among the first to bring a new radical and progressive perspective to the issue of underdevelopment in Africa.

Soon after its publication, the book gained widespread attention from progressive students, scholars and activists, and people concerned with African affairs. His innovative application of the method of political economy was a major factor contributing to changing conceptions of Africa’s past, present and possible future. Because it took the traditional mainstream and predominantly European and American historians of Africa to task and explained African underdevelopment largely in terms of imperialism and the prevailing neo-colonial order to task, it was also vociferously criticized. In recent decades, when the mainstream of development studies became dominated once again by neo-liberal economics, its visibility was diminished. Some scholars and pundits proclaimed that it was no longer a relevant work for Africa.

But, in The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (published by Daraja Press in 2017), Karim Hirji makes a powerful case that, on the contrary, Rodney’s seminal work retains its singular value for understanding where Africa has come from, where it is going, and where it might go. Hirji considers Rodney as a historian, a theoretician and a political activist. He begins by outlining the publication history and contents of HEUA and noting the comments it has drawn from varied quarters. This is followed first by a depiction of the global context within which it was conceived and published, and its specific place within the radical and progressive tradition, and then by the effectively counter-revolutionary trend of more recent decades. Rodney is recognized as a leading analyst and proponent of African development, whose work has real contemporary relevance.[3]

In June 1980, Wole Soyinke declared: ‘Walter Rodney was no captive intellectual playing to the gallery of local or international radicalism. He was clearly one of the most solidly ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look colonialism and its contemporary heir black opportunism and exploitation in the eye’.  In June 2010, Winston McGowan remarked, at the Walter Rodney Commemorative Symposium held at York College, USA, ‘Walter Rodney was a pioneering scholar who provided new answers to old questions and posed new questions in relation to the study of Africa’.  Hirji simply describes HEUA as ‘no doubt, the 20th century’s most important and influential book on African history’.

Walter Rodney and Andre Gunder Frank developed original and radical perspectives for understanding world development and history. In 1675, the pioneering scientist, Isaac Newton, explained that, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ The metaphor of standing on the shoulders of giants implies discovering truth by building on previous discoveries. This concept remains remarkably apt when discussing the work of both Rodney and Gunder Frank.

David Seddon is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.

Featured Photograph: a march of Indian and African workers after the murder of Walter Rodney in Guyana in 1980. 

Notes

[1] Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, published in 1960 at the height of the Cold War, significantly subtitled, ‘a non-communist manifesto’ and was intended not only as a contribution to development economics but also to political and economic intervention by the US as leader of ‘the free world’ across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

[2] I had the privilege of teaching a Masters Programme on Contemporary World Development with him in the School of Development Studies at UEA for several years in the early 1980s.

[3]  Some of Walter Rodney’s books have been published with excellent introductions by Verso, including a new volume on the Russian revolution.

National Debt and Economic Crisis in Nigeria

By
ROAPE
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Nigerian trade unionist and activist, Lai Brown, argues that annual debt servicing in the country has a debilitating impact on the poor. In a country with poor health services, massive youth unemployment and broken health and education facilities, the Buhari regime is seeking an additional multi-billion dollar loan. The vicious cycle must be broken.

By Lai Brown

In Nigeria today a large chunk of the country’s national budget is still committed to debt servicing. This often affects state spending on other important aspects that have direct and positive impacts on the lives of working-class people such as health, education, social infrastructures and public industries.

Similarly, the huge allocations to debt servicing and continued payments of jumbo remunerations to political office holders often push governments in the regions to increase the tax burden on working-class people, especially as the capitalist crisis increases, resulting in the collapse of primary products with adverse effects on national income.

Nigeria’s foreign debt rose from US$10.3 billion in 2015 to US$22.08 billion in 2018. The African Development Bank in its African Economic Outlook (2019) stated that about 50% of the country’s revenue is now spent on external debt servicing. Concretely speaking, 2.45 trillion Naira was allocated to debt servicing in the 2020 budget out of 10.33 trillion Naira total expenditure (respectively, US$7 billion and US$28 billion).

The allocation to debt servicing has consumed a good chunk of projected expenditure. The government, in order to increase revenue largely for debt servicing and to maintain its spending on political staff, has increased the VAT from 5% to 7.5% and hiked electricity tariff by 70%. Other anti-people policies are also being rolled out. This is in a country that is yet to pay the meagre US$86 minimum wage per month, with poor health services, massive youth unemployment and dilapidated health and education facilities.

Basically, the 2020 budget expenditure was increased by 16.9% from 2019, meanwhile the allocation to debt servicing received a 12.6% increment, allocations to capital expenditure and recurrent (non-debt) expenditure got 5.4% and 21.09% increments respectively. From that it can be further established that the allocation to debt servicing will take a sizeable amount of the revenue to be generated through debilitating attacks on the living conditions of working-class people.

The allocations to capital expenditure such as health, education and other social infrastructures have also been cut. Yet the Buhari regime in Nigeria is seeking an additional US$29.96 billion loan, which some economic analysts have argued will see a further and debilitating allocation to annual debt servicing.

Understanding Debt

Increasing public debt either incurred from national finance capital or external creditors have had terrible impacts on working-class people in African states. External debts, in particular, have had dire political consequences, strengthening foreign political as well as economic control on the continent.

The hydra-headed implications of public debts in Africa have their roots in the constriction of fiscal policy space. This is because loans, particularly from international financial institutions, come with stringent qualitative and quantitative conditions. This situation is worsened by corruption. So, sections of the ruling class in control of the state feather their nests with kickbacks from the loans. The poor end up bearing the double burden of debt repayments and conditionalities and a self-serving comprador bourgeoisie.

These loans and foreign debts provide ample opportunity for imperialist powers and the local elite to influence and control sociopolitical as well as economic spaces in neo-colonial Africa. The murdered leader of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, correctly captured this situation in the 1980s when he said, ‘Debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa.’

When General Muhammadu Buhari-led military junta seized power in a coup d’état in 1983, Nigeria’s external debt as was approximately US$17 billion. The regime condemned the 2nd republic politicians it overthrew for profligacy and vowed to avoid further national indebtedness. This was of course part of its strategy to win popular support and thus legitimize itself, on the basis of a nationalist agenda.

In 1986, the military junta led by General Ibrahim Babangida which overthrew the Buhari regime a year earlier in a palace coup, borrowed US$2.8 billion from the IMF. Despite posturing about a homegrown economic policy, it implemented the IMF’s conditionalities such as deregulation, privatization, free market pricing etc. These were neoliberal policies packaged into a structural adjustment programme (SAP). Following the implementation of SAP in 1986, the previous state welfare programmes were rolled back and a new anti-poor people macroeconomic era was entrenched. State Owned Enterprises (SOE) were sold off (mainly to the junta’s cronies and personnel), and a wage freeze instituted.

This method of using loans as leverage to introduce neoliberal policies is not unique to Nigeria. As we know, the story is largely the same from the horn of Africa to the coast of Madagascar and beyond. Generally, these loans were toxic, devastating for the working people in Africa.

Debt and System Change

An important question that begs an urgent answer is, why seek loans which will put a greater burden on the nation’s economy, if the jumbo payments to political office holders can be reduced by placing them on the average salaries of workers to improve public funding?

A large section of the Nigerian ruling class and their apologists often argue that the country’s debt profile is in good shape considering that the debt to GDP ratio remains supposedly low. Even some figures on the radical left lend their voices to this kind of argument. In their view, getting loans is not a problem as Nigeria can still receive three times its current debts. The problem they say is how such loans are spent. But these ‘experts’ play down the fact that loans have been used to satisfy the interests of a narrow and privileged class on the continent.

This was not always the case. In the 1950s to early 1970s, budget deficits were used to finance social services in the welfare states of Europe and the early developmental states in Africa. This was part of a broader framework of social compromise where capitalist states provided full, or near full employment, and the risks of working-class struggle was mitigated. Yet in the neoliberal era, in much of the Global South, enormous wealth is simply being siphoned by the political and economic elite.

Equally, it is both morally and politically incorrect to use the Debt-to-GDP ratio and European Union benchmarks to justify securing further loans. It must be noted that the GDP in Nigeria and many other Africa nations does not reflect actual economic performance. An idea exposed in the sham notion of ‘Africa rising.’ In a nation with a large and increasing socioeconomic gap and a minimum wage still pegged at US$50 per month, economic growth has not translated into any significant improvement in the lives of the popular masses.

It is important to note that, essentially, a low debt to GDP ratio implies the economy can produce and sell goods and services to pay back the loans without incurring further debt. Such logic itself has been exposed in Nigeria, despite the country’s low debt to GDP ratio, the country continues to borrow to service previously incurred debts. The vicious cycle continues.

If it is correct for us to seek more loans based on EU or OECD guidelines, then there must be an increase to the budgetary allocation to education to meet at least 26% target recommended by UNESCO’s and the allocation to health to 15% according to the Africa Union’s own Abuja Declaration.

To end the parasitic economic system in Nigeria and beyond, popular actions which the #RevolutionNow struggle represents, must be sustained and broadened. The struggle must be broadened in terms of mass participation of left groups and working-class people. It should also be widened in terms of interventions and programs. The anti-people programs and policies of the regime, such as electricity tariff hikes, VAT increments, poor funding of education and health, and attempts to place further economic burdens on the poor must be resisted. Radical education, including on the economy and politics, must also play a part in the system change Nigeria and the continent desperately need.

Lai Brown is the National Organising Secretary of the Automobile, Boatyards and Technical Equipment and Allied Staff Union (AUTOBATE), an affiliate of the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria.      

Featured Photograph: ‘Are Chinese infrastructure loans putting Africa on the debt-trap express?’ in South China Morning Post (illustration: Lau Kakuen).

Talking Back: an interview with Jessica Horn

By
ROAPE
-

Continuing her series of interviews with radical African feminists, Rama Salla Dieng speaks to Jessica Horn. As a poet and activist, Jessica describes her involvement in feminist groups and movements on the continent, and how repressive economic and political structures must be changed to enable woman to genuinely thrive.

Rama: Thanks for accepting to be part of this interview series on roape.net, I discovered your work a few years ago through the blog you created with Amina Doherty, Our Space is love.  I believe you identify as an artivist, can you please tell us more about your creative work and the philosophy of love revolution?

Jessica: It’s actually a relief that you begin by asking me about art, and about love, and the way that both fuel revolutionary praxis. I say relief because I spend much of my time working in the pragmatic and practical worlds of institutional efforts towards transformation where we can often lose sight of the aesthetic and the emotional resources that humans have always drawn on to inspire and create change. This is true in African liberation struggles where music, literature, theatre and other art forms have always been integral to resistance. I am a poet, and my poetry is often political, however in many ways that is not intentional – it is just a product of the fact that I am channelling the experience of the world around me and reflecting them back in poetic form. Revolutionary love is a concept I started exploring in the early 2000s after a particularly harrowing experience in an African feminist movement space. I started thinking about what energies we choose to tap into in our activist communities. I remembered my mother’s words: ‘to love is to free’, and thinking about how then the practice of freedom is ultimately a practice of love. So, I started writing about it, speaking about it, co-creating around it, and building collective spaces, like The Love Mic – as a way to inspire us to express and explore how love fuels our desires for revolution, and vice versa.

Rama: This is so powerful Jessica, following your and Amina’s blog definitely inspired me, and I believe a lot of other young feminists. Your words also remind me of the powerful response of Bibi Bakare-Yusuf when asked in an interview about why she created Cassava Republic. Her response was just beautiful, it was the emergency to move the narrative from ‘the politics of the belly’ to the ‘poetics of the belly.’ As an award-winning poet Jessica, whose work has influenced you?

Jessica: I come from a family of writers and readers. My grandfather, Timothy Bazarrabusa, was a pioneer in developing poetry and fiction in his language Rutoro (spoken in Western Uganda), and my father is a literature professor and part of the pioneering generation of theatre for development practitioners. My poetry was influenced in my teenage years and twenties by political poets – in particular African American feminist poets like Sonia Sanchez and Ntozake Shange and writers like Eduardo Galeano and June Jordan,  but also the mystics – Rumi and Hafiz – who explore love, spirit, and the natural world as sources of insight into humanity. Poetry to me is a practice of witnessing. It’s why I called my first poetry collection Speaking in Tongues ; I was channelling the stories of the world and lives of women around me.

Rama: This is so inspiring Jessica, thanks. Can you please tell us about your role in putting in place the African Feminist Forum (AFF), and the motivations for this?

Jessica: My journey with the African Feminist Forum actually started in Zanzibar, at a now fabled meeting of African feminists that ended in fundamental disagreement. I was the youngest person in the room, and also ended up as the youngest member of the founding African Feminist Forum Working Group that came together to create the AFF. For the inaugural African Feminist Forum in Accra in 2006 I led  the process of developing the agenda and was active in the planning, which, in retrospect I suppose was significant given that I was in my mid 20s. I also co-edited the first edition of Voice, Power and Soul: Portraits of African Feminists which was a significant book at the time because no one had produced a publication profiling so many African feminists before.

After the last African Feminist Forum in Harare in 2016, I worked with colleagues to create the third edition of this series which we decided to do in film to redress the lack of film documentation of African feminist activists. The series is available online and is again the first of its kind to profile this many African feminists in the medium of film interviews.

The AFF is an incredible space, allowing African feminist to meet each other on our own ground and across different disciplines and modes of feminist intervention. I have met African feminists whose theory and practice informed my early activism, and have made feminist friends that will stay with me for life.

Rama: How about the African Feminist Charter?

Jessica: The African Feminist Charter, in full the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists,  was a collective grounding document, developed by the African Feminist Forum Working Group and endorsed by more than 100 African feminists that attended the first African Feminist Forum in Accra in 2006. It is significant in that it lays out some bottom lines as well as big picture visions. Perhaps the most valuable has been its principles around affirming the rights to choose regarding our sexual and reproductive bodies. These positions have been the red line so to speak that differentiates African feminists from ‘gender activists’ and people working more generally around women and gender equality.

On joining, every member of the AFF or a national feminist forum have to sign on to the Charter, a process that involves individual and collective clarification of values around what we stand for as feminists. This process has proved invaluable in building a base of clear and brave solidarity in the face of religious fundamentalist backlash across Africa. The national feminist forums in Uganda and Nigeria for example have been a core community of solidarity against repeated efforts to impose harsh homophobic and sexist legislation and growing intolerance at a popular level. As the Charter states, ‘Our feminist identity is not qualified with “Ifs”, “Buts”, or “Howevers”’- stating a position against excuses to not stand up for the full gamut of feminist demands by invoking culture or religion.

The Charter itself has been translated in collective translation processes into French, Portuguese, Arabic, Kiswahili and Wolof and is used widely. We have even had feedback on feminists using it in South Asia and other global regions, which is fantastic.

Rama: Thank you, Jessica. What do you think are the challenges and priorities for grant-making in relation to women, and minority groups in Africa?

Jessica: Grant-making in order to be effective has to follow the political priorities of the movements that it seeks to support. African feminist movements and activism span the gamut of political, economic, social and cultural rights and transformation agendas, as well as environment and climate justice, so we have to be attentive to each of these interlinked issues. In terms of how donors fund, we know it is vital to pay for core expenses to allow organisations to sustain salaries, invest in institutional growth and change and be able to be agile and not stuck in a project-restricted mindset.

We also need to support the process of introducing new people to African feminist work and consciousness and build and replenish a broad leadership that way. As we do of course, we need to take into account the diversity of African identities and needs across the gamut of issues from disability to sexual orientation, gender identity, age, class, HIV status. People mobilise as their full selves and so our grant-making needs to ensure that we allow for that and allow for solidarity across identities as well.

Rama: Religious fundamentalisms are on the rise everywhere, and Africa is no exception. This has been examined by feminist scholars including yourself, Ayesha Imam here or here, Fatou Sow, Mame Penda Ba, Barbara Bompani, Adrian van Klinken, to name a few and various research institutions such as WLUML, AWID and Timbuktu Institute. In an AWID Report, you map the terrain of Christian Fundamentalisms and Women’s Rights in the African Context. Most specifically you also document the ways in which Christian fundamentalists that occupy political and policy-making positions have used these institutional powers to back Pentecostal churches in Uganda and promote homophobia, restrict feminist organising (the arrest of Stella Nyanzi illustrates this), adopt a conservative position on the use of condoms for instance. In your opinion, what are the main challenges of this fundamentalist threat, and how can feminists counter it despite the continuous closing of their civic spaces?

Jessica: The roots of the rise of fundamentalisms are structural. As much as the African region is growing in official economic statistics, the income gaps are widening. People are feeling disenfranchised and abandoned by governments on education, health, infrastructure and the economy. We speak of a collectivist spirit, but actually consumer capitalism very much frames our visions and desires. People want to be rich and they see the very rich passing by in Pajeros and think ‘that could be me.’

Interestingly charismatic Christian fundamentalisms tend to focus both on the policing of people’s sexuality and health choices, but also very much on hyper-consumerism and wealth accumulation – the so-called prosperity gospel.  So, the discourse provides for both the hope that life will change for the better, and also social pariahs to blame for why it is not going well. Muslim fundamentalisms also draw on grievances and enforce restrictive patriarchal visions for women’s political and bodily freedoms, although the economic dynamic is different.

In terms of responding, the challenge is the scale at which fundamentalists are resourced and hence mobilise. And there we really do have a problem on our hands as feminists when it comes to fundamentalisms, and this is because it has become increasingly difficult to defend principles of secularism and critical perspectives on religion within women’s rights space itself. Of course, activists are part of the societies that we live in, and as those societies become increasingly bound by conservative religious politics so do some of the people in our spaces. It also means the stakes for being a vocal feminist activist become higher, and some people are getting cold feet. There are many examples of people who are supportive of say access to safe abortion or LGBTI rights ‘at the feminist conference’ but will not stand up in public to pledge their support. We owe it to ourselves to take a deeper look within and reaffirm why we critique these patriarchal visions of our bodies and choices, and how religion is being used as a tool to reinforce social and emotional violence and exclusion.

Rama: You are the busy Programme Director of the AWDF and also a writer and a mother. How do find a balance between these roles, and how you practice self-care?

Jessica: Well the truth is, I haven’t yet! I am exhausted. That’s the truth and am saying it because it is the truth for many of us. Our economies were not designed with mothers in mind, and these days I think everyone is feeling the reality of overwork and constant pressure to be ‘on’. Productivity is king (I use that gendered phrase intentionally). This is the reality of late capitalism and it is breaking our reserves of resilience. We need to rethink it. In a moment when the expectation is to do more perhaps what we actually have to do is less? On International Worker’s Day a few years ago I wrote about the need to reclaim the point of the day which is actually a celebration of the right to rest.

Rama: I really love the lullabies for freedom’s girls you shared last year. What is feminist mothering in your opinion, and how do you walk the talk?

Jessica: Feminist mothering means applying the same principles of feminism – a critique of patriarchy and its intersections, and the affirmative vision of being differently in the world – to the work of mothering. To me it has meant actively seeking out affirming, pro-woman obstetric care and birth support so that I could have the birth that I chose to and not an over-medicalised, interventionist birth that is so common in patriarchal birth practice. It has meant listening to guidance and knowledge from other women around breastfeeding, nutrition, and methods of infant care and listening to my own mother’s sound advice to raise my child as fits with my own ethics and not what people tell me I should be doing. It has meant negotiating care work from the very beginning with my partner, and also allowing him the space to be a loving father in all dimensions of care and not silence him with ideas of conventional masculinity and what his role ‘should’ be. We operate on the assumption that both of us are professionals and need to be able to do the work we love, while also supporting each other and our child to grow, learn and have the care that she needs. As for the relationship with my child, my daughter goes everywhere with me and with us (including to protests, arts events and activist seminars!) and can explore as she likes. Her girlhood is not a limit, it is an open door of possibility.

Rama: Amen to that! Last question: What does a feminist future look like?

Jessica: A feminist future is a future outside of patriarchal power and its oppressive intersections. It requires the structural conditions for everyone to make autonomous, life-sustaining choices and to have opportunities to be and thrive together. I place emphasis on the structural because the liberal feminist narrative of ‘choice’ masks the reality that most African women exist in economic and political contexts that do not enable us to thrive. It has to mean a future where the sustainability of the earth is taken into consideration and where we have redistributive rather than extractive economies. It is a future where we all belong, and where xenophobia and deeply (neo)colonial homophobia and patriarchal silencing of women’s diversities are replaced with a radical embrace of difference. We all have a right to belong. To me, it is not a utopian idea, it is something we have been actively working towards all of these years. I am hopeful that the seeds of this collective African feminist labour will grow into a vibrant present-to-be.

Jessica Horn is a feminist activist, writer and technical adviser with roots in Uganda. Her activism and analysis focuses on body politics, social movements, philanthropy and building scenarios for feminist futures.

Rama Salla Dieng is a Senegalese writer, academic and activist. She is currently a Lecturer in African and International Development at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. Rama is the editor of the Talking Back series on roape.net and a member of ROAPE’s editorial working group.

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For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
Subscribe
Donate
We use cookies to collect and analyse information on site performance and usage, and to enhance and customise content. By clicking into any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. To find out more see our
Privacy Policy