In Defence of Radical Political Economy

December 5, 2018

In a powerful defence of Marxist political economy John Saul argues that ‘facing down the hulk of capital that presently bestrides the world was never going to be easy.’ Though as ‘powerful and ill-intentioned as capitalists’ might be ‘as they destroy the world, environmentally and morally’, everything, in Africa and elsewhere, continues to depend on the struggle of the oppressed. In this contribution he blends his on-going work on Africa with a more general analytical and theoretical consideration on progressive political economy. The fruitfulness of this approach is exemplified in his forthcoming book, Revolutionary Hope vs Free-Market Fantasies: Towards the Revival of Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa (to appear in 2019). There readers can see a more elaborated model of the method of both learning and communicating – in exploring the juxtaposition between theory on the one hand and ‘practice’, in the chapters ‘southern Africa and beyond’ – than is possible here.

Left, Right and Centre: On Regrounding a Progressive Political Economy of Africa for the 21st Century

By John Saul

A version of this contribution to roape.net was initially written earlier in 2018 as a paper solicited by the editors Toyin Falola and Samuel O. Oloruntoba for inclusion in their volume entitled The Palgrave Handbook of Africa Political Economy and to be published in 2019 by Palgrave-Macmillan. It is they who have permitted roape.net to use a version it here in advance of the publication of their own book. I am grateful to them for this comradely gesture.

How are we best to think of a relevant political economy for the understanding of developments in present-day Africa? To begin with it must be a political economy that takes seriously both terms – ‘political’ and ‘economy’ – in the approach chosen: each emphasis is real, each is necessary. Thus, it is equally relevant to assess the weight and substance of the class-defined and globally-defined nature of production, distribution and economic inequality as it is to assess the power-defined nature of political rule and, linked to it, the precise lived parameters of order and entitlement. There can, quite simply, be no ‘class reductionism’ – cast simply in terms of the ownership of the means and the relations of production – in any social analysis that claims to be meaningful and relevant. To my mind, however, the defining of the class-defined nature of the system of economic production can be/should be an absolutely essential first approximation to any meaningful understanding of the workings of all social systems. And this is, of course, no small matter. At the same time (and however essential) it can only be a first approximation to understanding the workings of any system so ‘over-determined’ as ‘a society.’ Thus, it is not only the polity that is ‘real’ within such a system. There are other determinants – those defined in terms of gender, racial differentiations, religious proclivities and national/ethnic belonging for example – that are every bit as real in the pertinent effects they have as are class – and polity-defined variables!

Of course, the Marxism-inclined scholar like myself will assert the quite essential role of explanations structured with an emphasis being laid upon the production process and class relations in any analysis of diverse societies so explained.’ And I have myself found such explanations to be essential to the grounding of the wide range of writing on Africa and particularly southern Africa that I have produced over a fifty-year period. Nonetheless, any such analysis can represent at best (as suggested above) only a first approximation – however essential and weighty such an ‘analysis’ may be and however accurate and scientifically coherent are the findings that it leads to. Not that any such approximation should be thought of as being based on some arbitrary whim; rather, at their best and most rigorous, such ‘approximations’ are based on a careful choice of just what it is that an author seeks most pressingly to know. This is a key point that needs further elaboration here, an elaboration that my first section (below) provides. For, with regard to social theory and the necessary concentration on a self-conscious and announced choice of questions that one chooses to then ask, I find a firm anchor for such an approach in what Hugh Stretton – who was, up until the time of his death in 2015, much the deepest thinker on such questions in the social sciences – has termed the idea of social science as a ‘moralizing science.’[1]

This is, therefore, the ‘idea,’ the ‘starting point,’ that I will now elaborate upon.

Political Economy as a ‘Moralizing Science’

Let me first seek to illuminate the central issue involved by citing here the work of several writers who emphasize, like Stretton, a related perspective on the pursuit of knowledge. For Marxists and socialists seek not only to change the world but also to interpret it as scientifically and accurately as is possible; indeed, their central concerns have given them tools with which to do so. Still, it is appropriate to ask just what, more broadly, is the kind of knowledge these concerns can produce. One answer to this was articulated by Lucio Colletti in his notable essay ‘Marxism: Science or Revolution?’[2] Colletti focused on the wage relationship within capitalism and conceded that ‘bourgeois social science’ (as viewed from ‘the point of view of the capitalist’, as Colletti put it) offers an understanding of that relationship as a ‘free exchange’ that is quite plausible (and, we might add, fits neatly into the ‘scientific’ undertakings of neo-classical economics). But, Colletti insisted, equally plausible (and even more pertinent to the cause of socialist revolution) is an understanding of this relationship – ‘from the viewpoint of the working class’ – as one of exploitation, and this angle of vision can also offer a revealing (but very different) analysis of the workings of capitalism. [3]

‘The worker’s point of view’? It is tempting to put it like this (not least for purposes of political mobilization), but we can actually advance the case for the prioritizing of a class analysis grounded in Marxist/socialist premises somewhat more modestly…but to even more assertive effect. Resnick and Wolff, for example, have done this convincingly in their volume, Knowledge and Class, rejecting both ‘empiricist’ and ‘rationalist’ epistemologies while announcing, unapologetically, that, as Marxists, they choose class analysis as their preferred ‘entry point’ into social enquiry._[4]

Interestingly, they make no claim that this is the only useful approach to society for purposes of theory or practice but assert merely that it is the one they find most illuminating to build from, both analytically and politically: ‘Class then is [the] one process among the many different processes of life chosen by Marxists as their theoretical entry point so as to make a particular sense of and a particular change in this life.’

But ‘why choose class as an entry-point rather than, say, racial or sexual oppression?’:

Our answer may serve to clarify our relations both to Marx and to those people today (including friends) whose entry points and hence theories differ more or less from ours. What Marx sought, and we continue to seek to contribute to struggles for social change, are not only our practical energies but also certain distinctive theoretical insights. The most important of these for us concerns class. Marx discovered, we think, a specific social process that his allies in social struggle had missed. The process in question is the production and distribution of surplus labour in society. Marx’s contribution lay in defining, locating and connecting the class process to all other processes comprising the social totality they all sought to change. Marx’s presumption was that programs for social change had less chance of success to the degree that their grasp of social structure was deficient.[5]

Note, in addition, that Resnick and Wolff see this way of expressing things as avoiding any kind of reductionism and instead as defining a Marxism that is open, precisely, to ‘the mutual overdetermination of both class and non-class’ dimensions, and thus to ‘the complex interdependencies of class and non-class aspects of social life…that neither Marx nor we reduce to cause-effect or determining-determined essentialisms.’[6]

In fact, and even if too seldom acknowledged, this kind of argument seems not only essential but also straightforward enough. Moreover, even if some social scientists are uncomfortable with the notion of an inevitably ‘moralizing social science,’ the Marxist/socialist social scientist has every reason to embrace it. After all, is this not what the unity of theory and practice is all about? This is the argument of Gavin Kitching, for example, who writes (approvingly) that Marxism is much less a science than a ‘point of view,’ and, more specifically, a point of view ‘on or about the form of society that it calls capitalism.’[7]

For Kitching, ‘the Marxist point of view’ (which term Kitching himself adopts) turns out to be a ‘rationally motivated willingness to act to transform capitalism.’ It has been, Kitching argues, ‘the “objectively best” point of view to take on capitalism … in order to change it into a better form of society’[8] – and hence also the basis for the kind of politics of persuasion and mobilization of interests that could alone make the struggle for socialism viable. I find this convincing – even though Kitching himself seems to take his own argument much too far when he suggests that, whatever may be its positive moral-cum-political value, the Marxist point of view does not provide any ‘privileged means’ of understanding the workings of capitalist society and its contradictions. The truth is, as noted above, that Marxists and socialists seek not only to change the world but also to interpret it – and their central concerns have indeed given them tools with which to do so.

Moreover, this also takes us full-circle and back to the basic epistemological argument which we referred to at the outset, back, in fact, to Stretton’s argument that there is no more meaningful foundation upon which to build a social science than the acknowledgement that social science is – must be – a ‘moralizing science.’ To elucidate this case further we will first make brief initial reference to another hard-headed methodological pioneer, E. H. Carr and to his seminal text: What Is History? For Carr tells us to ‘Study the historian before you begin to study the facts,’ since

…the necessity to establish these basic facts rests not on any quality of the facts themselves, but on an a priori decision of the historian…It used to be said that the facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context…By and large the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation. [9]

And where do such choices come from? Not primarily, I would suggest, from some evolving and shifting consensus as to what is pertinent to the best ‘scientific’ explanations emerging within social science disciplines (even if that can have a certain weight). No, they come, as Hugh Stretton argues (in his aforementioned and powerful manual of clear-sighted common sense with regard to methodology, The Political Sciences) that they come, inevitably, from moral choices as to what is taken to be important. In short, historical and social sciences are, in Stretton’s phrase, ‘moralizing sciences,’ a point exemplified in his conclusion – after his canvassing of a number of diverse approaches to answering, as an example, the question of what caused late nineteenth century imperialism – that even if his wide range of authors had

…all agreed to explain the same events and had made no mistakes of fact…it should still be clear that they would have continued to differ from each other. It should also be clear that their diverse purposes – to reform or conserve societies, to condemn or justify past policies, to reinforce theoretical structures – might well have been served by a stricter regard for truth, but could scarcely be replaced by it…. However desirable as qualities of observation, “objectivity” and its last-ditch rearguard “intersubjectivity” still seem unable to organize an explanation or to bring men of different faith to agree about the parts or the shape, the length or breadth or depth or pattern, that an explanation should have. [10]

In sum, Stretton concludes, ‘neutral scientific rules’ cannot ‘replace valuation as selectors.’ And thus the ‘scientistic’ dream of developing an internally coherent, self-sustaining and [potentially] exhaustive model of society [can be seen to be] not only misguided but dangerous – dangerous in the sense of encouraging a blunting of debate about the ‘political and moral valuations’ that necessarily help shape both the questions posed of society and the explanations that contest for our attention regarding social phenomena. Indeed, he then calls for the self-conscious embrace of what he terms a (necessarily) ‘moralizing [social] science.’ We might wish to add that, once the questions themselves have been posed, the social scientist can and must still be judged by his or her peers in terms of the evidence discovered and adduced in the attempt to answer them, and in terms of the logic and coherence of the arguments presented. There are scientific canons of evidence and argument in terms of which explanations can, up to a point, be judged ‘intersubjectively.’ But the questions themselves quite simply do not emerge unprompted from such concerns alone.

From the Left: The Political Economy of the Enragés

Begin an analysis of advanced capitalist societies and of their global impact from a starting point, a moral premise, that sees capitalism as a system premised, most notably, on the extraction of productive labour at a price well below the market value of the good or service that the labour so purchased creates for the capitalist enterprise/employer who pays the wage. A Marxist, understandably enragé/angry, would call a system that premises its ‘relations of production‘ in such a way as being, fundamentally, one committed to the reproduction of tangible social inequality, and characterized, at its core, by its indifference to the fact of ‘exploitation.’ But it is also one, many Marxist have argued/assumed, that, almost inevitably, gives rise to ‘class struggle’ between the owners of the means of production (the ‘capitalist class’) and the ‘working class.’

In theory, the logic of this reading of capitalist-centric social reality is perfectly clear, even compelling, in Africa as well as in the more advanced-capitalist world but, politically, things have not worked out quite so straightforwardly at either end of this spectrum. The ’other side’ is trying too, of course, and the fact is that the right has the money, the economic power, and all too often both the overbearing political clout of the state and the salience within the society’s structures of cultural creation that helps drive, enforce and disseminate the practical and normative social preoccupations that give ‘capitalist common-sense’ its resonance in the minds and the politics of the less advantaged.

Indeed, in an overbearingly capitalist world built on the presumed superior logic of ‘possessive individualism,’ a privatizing and disempowering mind-set is pervasive, one which sees each of us as being alone in the market-place, mainly anxious to get ‘our share’ – however unequally such shares may have proven to be in comparison to the ‘entitlements’ of other richer and more powerful social claimants. This privatizing logic of capitalist ideology was perhaps most clearly spelled out by the infamous right-wing politician Margaret Thatcher who offered the bald opinion that ‘There is no such thing as “society”; there are individual men and women and there are families.’[11] In so far as present societal developments encourage such a perspective to take hold quite widely, the Marxian world of the primacy of presumed collective and more egalitarian entitlements begins to move further and further away from so-called ‘reality’…as most people come to know and to experience it!

This is, in fact as true for, say, contemporary African societies as it is for those in the North Atlantic zone…although the precise mix of relevant social actors may vary from society to society. These variations will be linked, in turn, to trends in the structure of stratification that the world-wide hegemony of capitalism has produced, trends that help deflect the logic of class confrontation and that undermine left solidarity. Most graphic, especially in the Global South, is the fissure amongst people at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid between those with fixed employment and a degree of organizational power (e.g. union membership) on the one hand and those with neither stable employment nor any work-place-based access to socio-political power on the other. I have elsewhere termed this second stratum as ‘the precariat’ and discussed some of implications of such a real dividing-line. [12] I have also discussed there the political methods that that might begin to facilitate a genuine suturing of such a social lesion before it becomes disabling, this in the interests both of long term healing and of joint and coordinated political action.

And there are other diversities of situation and intention that imply liberating social purposes but that, in the absence of broad political, principled and effectively democratic self-mobilization (again vanguardism need not apply, thank you very much…although there is a role for judicious and open-minded leadership!), never seem to add up into a focused left movement with truly effective transformative potential. To be sure, these ‘diversities’ reflect social identifiers whose salience is rooted in differences of gender, of sexual preference, of race, of religion, and of diverse ethnies that, in all settings, can and must ‘speak to each other’ if a progressive social project is ever to become really hegemonic and not merely languish forever in the realm of utopian aspiration. In addition, there is a range of struggles – those based on environmental concerns and on varied campaigns for social justice (with respect to food, housing, education, health provision and the like) – that each signal the pursuit from ‘below’ of progressive goals of their own right.

In short, the continued invocation on the left of proletarian purpose, important though it undoubtedly can be, is only one card the ‘left’ will want to play in the building of a movement that could eventually mount a bid to give effective hegemonic voice to diverse progressive pursuits of a more viable, just and humane future. For the difficulty of building anywhere the kind of broader left movement – one not deformed by ‘vanguardism’ of the Stalinist/Trotskyist/arrogant and undemocratic ultra-leftist type – that seems to be appropriate should not be understated. It is true that the fact of multiple contradictions and diverse resistances within capitalist societies north and south does offer the left an invitation to reconcile diversities and work together to more effectively build, on many fronts, a decent society. And yet it remains true that the emergence of any such left movement must be an on-going work-in-progress (implying hard and imaginative political work!), with such a movement always threatening to self-destruct in the toils of rhetoric, self-righteousness, and a narrow definition of interests. Its very diversity also suggests that it can be all too readily subverted by both the destructive right-wing common sense linked to capital logic and by right-populist, even fascist, mystifications (that also, more tacitly, takes capitalist hegemony for granted).[13]

After all, these were the alternatives offered in the most recent U.S. presidential election by Clinton and Trump respectively… united as they were by a shared silence regarding the actual workings of capitalism (only Bernie Sanders raised any real questions about those). But to such matters we will have to return in our next section.

Meanwhile, there is one additional matter that political economy, be it of the left, right or centre, must deal with. For all societies are affected by the present global reality of capital’s hegemony. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa where, from the 1960s, decolonization has proved to be a false one (as Europe’s imperial hegemony was replaced by that of the United States, its capital and its state). Now, as I have argued elsewhere [14] and as numerous capitals (from China, India, North Korea, Brazil, etc.) have emerged to divide the world economy (alongside more familiar enterprises from Europe and North America), we begin to see the crystallization of what I have elsewhere called an Empire of Capital (an empire competitive within itself but with a shared commitment to capital’s broad hegemony). And the new empire’s ‘junior partners’: the elites, of social locations in the spheres of both state and entrepreneurial-enterprise within each of the ‘national economies’ themselves. As much as the Right may celebrate this logical outcome of the ever more far-reaching globalization of a world-wide empire of capital this is the stark and powerful enemy that now confronts each and every struggle to evoke collective and humane purpose throughout the world.[15]

From the Right and from the Centre

(i) The Political Economy of the ‘Entitled’

‘Political economy’ has not been historically a codename for left-leaning economics, of course. Recall, for example, that much of Marx’s own work was carried out in the name of a ‘critique of Political Economy’ (that was, for example, the subtitle of Marx’s most famous writing: the three volume Capital: Critique of Political Economy). Indeed, when I myself first studied economics, political science and sociology at the University of Toronto in the 1950s all three disciplines were seen as sub-sets (and housed under the umbrella) of the Department of Political Economy. There Marx was only rarely mentioned [16] and the core historical theories offered for intensive study were by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and the like. Their texts then provided the bases – the students’ rite of passage into the political economy of the entitled, as it were – for a more conventionally orthodox and pretty-much uncritically capitalist take on the world that then defined the student’s academic work in succeeding undergraduate years.

To be sure the right perspective was soon, and increasingly, to become more firmly fixed on the more abstract and mathematically-driven off-spring of these preoccupations.[17] Thus, for modern economics (and much political science and sociology), the ‘exploitation’ that Marxists argue premises capitalism’s production system simply does not exist as a salient, even relevant, category. For rightist concerns turn, almost immediately, to the workings of the market in which virtually everything finds its value weighed in market terms and, in theory, rendered socially intelligible and appropriate by the cut and thrust of ‘competition’ and by the workings of supply and demand. Quite apart from the opening that the pervasive global ideology of possessive individualism (in both advanced capitalist settings and more marginalized ones) gives to reconciling many of capitalism’s otherwise bizarre workings, here is a complementary ideological twist that is also of importance. For such guidelines are designed to persuade the unwary that socio-economic inequalities and the widely differentiated rewards which result from no-holds-barred capitalism merely represent a deserved payment for the societal guiding-hand that wealthy elites offer. Moreover, the assumed ‘likelihood’ is that the latter will simply reinvest their apparently lavish economic rewards in productive ways, an outcome from which we will all benefit! In short, the ideological key to such a system is some kind of trickle-down theory that suggests that inequality is the price the rest of us pay for progress.

The key ‘moralizing’ premise here, of course, is the enunciation of capital’s benign logic – capital as the force driving global production. And not only that: this ‘capital’ drives global production to the long-term benefit of us all, east and west, north and south. Add in some complexities: the extreme polarization between rich and poor in virtually all settings, the recolonization of Africa (to go no further afield) by the Empire of Capital; and the growing hegemony, within the equation of capital, of financial capital (with the movement of money becoming even more important than the movement of goods and services and with this development introducing new volatility and instability to the global system).[18]

As Patrick Bond further writes of this phenomenon of financialization,

Reflecting financiers’ political power, even as banks crashed in 2008-11, their lobbies were sufficiently strong that they gained public subsidies for vast bailouts (including Quantitative Easing) worth many trillions of dollars. Their power extends far beyond financial flows, into public policy, often through credit ratings agencies and the Bretton Woods Institutions, especially in Africa. The latest version of Africa’s debt crisis is occurring in the wake of the commodity price crash – partly a function of financial speculators in 2011-15 – and the manipulation of African currencies in international markets adds to the misery.[19]

Nonetheless, it is at moments like this that the right-wing variant of political economy (and the myth of the magic market) springs into action and waves its magic wand to signal that all is well.

Well, not quite well. Even in the United States, as seen, there is a growing suspicion of capitalism’s workings, which surfaced in the most recent presidential election, in the end, only in a particularly dark form: a fear–ridden, hatred-driven right-wing populist expression of American nationalism. And this has eerie echoes on the right in Germany, France, the UK and elsewhere. And, in settings in Africa as well as other parts of the global south, actions and attitudes from below can also cover a diverse range; some are of the left to be sure, but the left imaginary has not been extremely effective in off-setting other popular responses that stretch from religion-based extremism to right-populist outbursts, often on ethnic and ultra-nationalist lines, and to more privatized responses to economic disaster (indices of both cynicism and desperation) such as pure criminality and the like. Even some of those on the right are nervous about such impolite and ‘unbusinesslike’ behaviour: pure ‘market-freedom’ and capitalist-induced moral chaos, can produce for them some frightening monsters and not just from the left. As for the left itself this all signals, as suggested above, how much more hard political work we have to do in order to tame any such monsters, harness the productive system to humane purpose, and achieve anything like what we think to be important in most settings in the world.

(ii) The Political Economy of the Afterthought

Of course, for many people of the centre – left-liberals or social-democrats – the market cannot be granted such total authority in the determining of social outcomes that many on the right seen to advocate for it. For those of the centre the outcomes driven by the logic of sheer economic determinacy will sometimes seem too narrowly-defined, merely factoring out too many possibly preferred social outcomes to be allowed to stand unchallenged. More centrist politicians – unwilling to challenge capital logic in any more fundamental way and quite prepared, it would appear, to see continued state funding of any too marked ‘welfarist’ activities in various sectors of social life as an unwarranted ‘collectivist’ intrusion – will now argue, as the state funding of social provisions are inevitably slashed, the importance of increased charity as an antidote to the structural unfairness of some outcomes.[20]

Or, more daringly, they will argue for the continuing provision by the state of some range of societal ‘entitlements.’ But the terms are almost invariably quite stringent and limited by one guiding premise: capital will do the heavy lifting in the profitable productive sphere while centre-left worthies will do what they can with the returns from the beseeching of charitable provision, both local and international, and with such conscience money as can be pried away from the government to subsidize ameliorative efforts in such spheres as those of housing, food, health, public transportation, environmental protection and the like. This is the political economy of the centre, the political economy of the afterthought, then: a skimming of something off the top of capitalist profit in order to humanize, minimally, societal outcomes. And yet the inequalities stoked by such choices remain of staggering proportions…even as they also grow precipitously. A not particularly ‘brave’ new world then.

* * *

In sum, the embrace by the centre-left and of its ‘common-sense’ acceptance of (or resignation to) capitalist hegemony is extremely deeply embedded and capitalism itself does seem so strong, so ascendant, in so many pertinent ways – economically, politically, culturally that the dream of its demise appears to be just that: a leftist dream. So maybe the centre-left is correct: capitalism is just too big a problem and too strong a system – both globally and locally – for us really to expect to wrestle to the ground; and some state elites are just too blood-thirsty and power-driven to take any strong opposition to them lightly. Better then to chip away, seeking to realize some apparently small gains for collective decency. But perhaps even such a ‘realistic’ approach can be mounted in such a way as to have revolutionary point and purpose. Here I’ve found the approach – characterized as the active pursuit of ‘structural reform’ and so identified by the likes of André Gorz and Boris Kagarlitzky [21]– to be a promising formulation and a way to make real revolution slowly but surely: making it incrementally, less dangerously and less provocatively, but, depending on just how intransigent the resistance to the real transformation of those in power is, more likely to be successful than some more dramatic calls for ‘revolution,’ as a left strategy are likely to be. Here the crucial distinction is between ‘structural reform’ and ‘mere social-democratic reformism’ – the first of these alternatives being characterized by two chief attributes:

The first is the insistence that any reform, to be structural, must not be comfortably self-contained (a mere ‘improvement’) but must, instead, be allowed self-consciously to implicate other ‘necessary’ reforms that follow from it as part of an emerging and on-going project of structural transformation in a coherently left-ward direction. The second is that a structural reform cannot come from on high: instead it must root itself in popular initiatives in such a way as to leave a residue of further empowerment – in terms of growing enlightenment/ self-consciousness and in terms of organizational capacity – for the vast mass of the population who thus strengthen themselves for further struggles, further victories: [As Gorz writes,] ‘the emancipation of the working class [and its allies] can become a total objective only if in the course of the struggle they have learned something about self-management, initiative and collective decision – in a word, if they have had a foretaste of what emancipation means.’[22]

Can we imagine building a movement that is both long-term wise and short-term smart as this strategy implies.[23] It isn’t going to be easy, certainly, but whoever said facing down the hulk of capital that presently bestrides the world was ever going to be easy. Perhaps capitalists, as powerful and ill-intentioned as they generally are (and as their very system, premised on the pursuit of profit, forces them to be) are more likely to win than the rest of us – even as they destroy the world, environmentally and morally, in the process. But this is the struggle between two strands, left and right, of political economy and the world of struggle about the future of capitalism and of humanity that they have helped to define and to mould. And it ain’t over; indeed it continues.

John S. Saul has taught at York University, the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), the University of Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique) and the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa). He is the author/editor of more than twenty books on southern Africa and development issues and a founding member of the Review of African Political Economy.

Feature Photograph: Portrait of John Saul taken by Ben Joseph at the Ruth First Symposium on the 7 June 2012, hosted by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Review of African Political Economy.

Notes

[1]. See Hugh Stretton, The Political Sciences: General Principles of Selection in Social Science and History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); this book has been, since I first read it in the 1960s, of immense importance to the development of the epistemology that became crucial to my own scientific work. In addition I must also reference the work of several African-based writers and activists: Frantz Fanon (Fanon was actually from Martinique, but became most noted as both a militant and a thinker in and about Africa), Amilcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere and Steve Biko, among others.

[2]. Lucio Colletti, “Marxism: Science or Revolution” in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1972).

[3]. “I would say,” Colletti (ibid., 375) argues in this respect “that there are two realities in capitalism: the reality expressed by Marx and the reality expressed by the authors he criticizes.”

[4]. Stephen A Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, !987); “By entry points we mean that particular concept a theory uses to enter into its formulation, its particular construction of the entities and relations that comprise the social totality” (p. 25).

[5]. Resnick and Wolff, ibid., 99.

[6]. Resnick and Wolff, ibid., 281. That this approach can also lead to very soft definitions of capitalism and anti-capitalist struggle – see J. K. Gibson, The End of Capitlalism (As We Knew It) (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996) – is worth noting but, for me at least, does not undermine its merits. Quite the contrary.

[7]. Gavin Kitching, Marxism and Science: Analysis of an Obsession (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 168.

[8]. Kitching, ibid., 169-70.

[9]. E. H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1962) 5, 26.

[10]. Stretton, op. cit., 141.

[11]. In an interview that appeared in the British magazine Women’s Own (London, September 23, 1987).

[12]. See my chapter “The New Terms of Resistance: Proletariat, Precariat and the Present African Prospect” in Baris Karagaac, and also, as chapter 5, in my A Flawed Freedom: Rethinking Southern African Liberation (London, Toronto and Cape Town: Pluto Books, Between the Lines, and Juta/University of Cape Town Press, 2014).

[13]. Jan-Werner Muller, What is Populism? (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017)

[14]. See my On Writing and Acting on the Premise that the Struggle Continues (in press), ch 2, “In Theory: A Moralizing Science,” and especially that chapter’s sub-section (c): “Entry-Point 2: The Empire of Capital and Recolonization.” But see also ch. 3. In Theory: The Dialectic of Hope, and, specifically, “Entry-Point 8: The Science of Hope.”

[15]. Thus, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s valuable tome, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, emphasizes (mistakenly I feel) that, right up to the present moment, the world dances to the tune of the ever increasing ascendancy of American capital. Me, I cannot, for the life of me, see “Global Capitalism” and the “American Empire” as being the same thing (although both their book and its title clearly imply that they are). No, it’s an “Empire of Capital” we’re dealing, one within which U.S., both its state and its capital, is indeed a major player but very far from being the absolute global hegemon (and certainly not under the leadership of Donald Trump!). Note, however, that Panitch and Gindin also emphasize that “the continuing inequalities as well as the insecurities that the state’s promotion of capitalist markets within each country, and the protest and revolts that this provokes, provide fertile ground for the replanting of an alternative to global capitalism” (p. 339). Of course they can also lead (as witness Donald Trump’s ascendancy) to “right-Wing populism” and the seeds of fascism. The answer: organize, organize, organize.

[16]. There were singular exceptions of course, not least the noted Professor of Politics in the then Department of Political Economy, Brough Macpherson, author of, inter alia, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 [reprint edition]); indeed, this book, still in manuscript form at the time, was the text book for Macpherson’s mind-bending graduate class in political theory of which I was privileged to be a member. And there were others, especially those whose “economics” was linked to tangible historical concerns: H. A. Innis (a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto although before my time there), Karl Helleiner and Mel Watkins.

[17]. Indeed, as such arithmetic reductionism began also to resonate quite noticeably in both political science and sociology, one of my old Princeton professors of Politics (A. E. W. Mason) ironically counselled us in his class in the early 1960s that “In political science if you want to get it wrong, add it up”!

[18]. As Patrick Bond (in a personal communication, May 26, 2018) defines this latter process, “Financialization is witnessed in the relative decline of productive sector investment and profitability and, instead, the increased role of debt, financial speculation, deregulated forms of money, and illicit banking activities as a share of economic activity.” See, for a more detailed analysis of the overall “financialization” phenomenon, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, op. cit.

[19]. Patrick Bond, personal communication (op. cit).

[20]. There is nothing wrong, per se, with charity perhaps, especially as it affects provisioning of the arts and the like. However, in advanced capitalist settings charity is self-consciously evoked by our rulers as a substitute for collective (state) provisioning (thus also, in effect, decertifying a range of numerous essential, and equality-facilitating services in what are/should be clearly public spheres); this is further to yield to the corporate logic of weakening the rights attendant upon citizenship as well as move towards minimizing the legitimate social claims that citizenship could (and should!) imply.

[21] See Andre Gorz, Socialism and Revolution (New Haven: Anchor, 1973), the chapter entitled, specifically, “Socialism and Revolution,” and Boris Kagarlitsky, The Dialectic of Change (London: Verso, 1998); see also ch. 3, subsection (h), “Entry-point 7: Socialism, Democracy and the Struggle That Continues,”

[22]. See, as quoted several times in these paragraphs, Andre Gorz, Socialism and Revolution (New Haven: Anchor, 1973); this particular quote also appears in my essay “Is Socialism Still an Alternative?,” ch. 5 in John S. Saul, Liberation Lite: The Roots of Recolonization in Southern Africa (Delhi and Trenton, N. J.: Three Essays Collective and Africa World Press, 2011), at p. 95.

The Cover Up: Complicity in Rwanda’s Lies

ROAPE

November 21, 2018

Recently the World Bank published a paper on poverty in Rwanda. The aim of the paper was to deal with the debate started in 2015 by Filip Reyntjens, and which continues on roape.net, on the reliability of Rwandan poverty statistics. Despite the objectives, when properly calculated, the evidence presented by the World Bank actually strongly supports the claim that poverty has increased in Rwanda. Yet the selective and even misleading presentation of supporting empirical evidence by the World Bank is, to say the least, disturbing. Our Rwanda experts ask if the World Bank is guilty of a worrying level of leniency and incompetence, or outright complicity in the manipulation of Rwanda’s official statistics.

In September 2018, the World Bank published a paper entitled ‘Revisiting the Poverty Trend in Rwanda 2010/11-2013/14’, the stated aim of which was to resolve [i.e. shut down?] the debate initiated three years earlier by Filip Reyntjens (2015), and followed up by several roape.net blog posts, about the reliability of Rwandan official poverty statistics.

In the World Bank’s own words, the ‘unfounded claims about stagnation in poverty (…) creat[e] confusion and muddy the primary purpose of welfare estimation and poverty monitoring, limiting timely and relevant policy making’ (World Bank 2018, p.2). This candid introduction has the merit of clarifying from the outset that the chief concern of the World Bank in this matter is to shield policy-makers from the confusing interference of prying academics. Their paper , aims, not to check or question the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda’s (NISR) results, but to provide an ex-post theoretical rationale for them, so to let policy-makers get on with their ‘primary purpose’ of making ‘timely’, if not necessarily ‘relevant’ policy. Yet relevance, of course, requires robust evidence, which in turns requires academic scrutiny.

In so doing, the World Bank has effectively managed to write an academic paper in reverse: the findings (i.e. NISR’s claimed poverty reduction) are defined at the start of the paper, and assumed, as a matter of faith, to hold true. The World Bank then proceeds to construct a theoretical framework around those findings to show that it is hypothetically possible to arrive at conclusions that are consistent with NISR’s official poverty statistics. The limited empirical evidence that is presented invariably supports the pre-defined conclusions and is presented without any robustness checks or even basic caveats, and sometimes even with serious mistakes. The considerable body of adverse empirical evidence that has been generated in various blogs and papers is simply ignored or assumed away without further justification.

By carefully reviewing each of their claims and correcting the mistakes and omissions in the World Bank’s paper, we will show that the World Bank’s paper probably will help to settle this debate, but possibly not in the way that the World Bank intended.

The main contribution of the World Bank’s paper is to lay out in detail the various steps involved in NISR’s poverty estimation. This makes it easier to understand NISR’s decision-making process, and to identify precisely the sources of discrepancies between the various poverty estimations. In particular, the World Bank clarifies that the NISR poverty statistics were produced in two stages. This blogpost will look at each of NISR’s estimation stages in turn, before looking at the additional supporting evidence presented by the World Bank in support of NISR’s claims.

Original NISR Poverty Estimates

In the first stage of poverty estimations, the NISR produced official poverty statistics (NISR 2015), which were based on a semi-normative minimum consumption basket and concluded that 39.1% of the Rwandan population lived below the poverty line (down from 44.9% four years earlier). The key step in this poverty estimation was step five: ‘In the last step, to arrive at the “minimum” cost of obtaining the “defined” basket, higher cost per calorie items are replaced by lower cost per calorie items in their respective meta food category’ (World Bank 2018, p.7). The crucial detail left out in the World Bank’s presentation is that it is this fifth step that allowed NISR to lower the EICV4 poverty line by close to 20%, and crucially, it is this step alone that accounts for the 6 percentage points decrease in poverty between EICV3 and EICV4 in the NISR 2015 poverty report (EICV is the acronym for Enquête Intégrale sur les Conditions de Vie des ménages, or Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey in English). Without this fifth step, NISR would have concluded that poverty increased by between 5 and 7 percentage points between 2010 and 2014.

Since the poverty line used in 2010 did not include this fifth step, it is not possible (in fact it would be preposterous, even by the World Bank’s own standards) to compare the official poverty rate produced in 2010 with the official poverty rate published in 2014. The World Bank euphemistically hints at this incomparability when they state that ‘Condition (ii) – comparability of COLIs – and condition (iii) – the update of poverty lines, however, may not hold.’ In plain language, the key reason why the comparison of official poverty rates in EICV3 and 4 ‘may not hold’ is that the two surveys use different types of poverty lines (an average empirical four-step poverty line in EICV3 and a minimum semi-normative five-step poverty line in EICV4).

The lack of rigor in the World Bank’s ‘may not’ conclusion is surprising, given the apparent effort that has been put into ensuring mathematical formalization of the arguments. In fact, the vagueness of the ‘may not’ conclusion effectively defeats the purpose of opting for mathematical formalization to present this particular argument, since the main aim of formalization is to generate precise and rigorous statements that can be empirically verified as true or false. If they insist on formalization, the World Bank should go all the way in this effort to establish definitively whether EICV3’s average four-step poverty line and EICV4’s five-step minimum poverty line are comparable (and they aren’t!) Alternatively, the World Bank could abandon their formalization effort, which in this case appears aimed at excluding non-experts from the discussion rather than facilitating expert verification, and simply explain in layman’s terms why they think that an average four-step consumption basked ‘may’ in some cases be comparable with a minimum five-step consumption basket (yet they won’t be able to!)

The key question here is whether the change in the type of poverty line is, itself, driving the poverty reduction (i.e. whether the poverty reduction can be seen as an artifact of the methodological change), or whether such poverty reduction would have occurred regardless of what specific methodological choices had been made in EICV3 and EICV4. This is a question that the World Bank could, for instance, have tried to answer by carrying out robustness checks to see to what extent more or less comparable consumption baskets generate similar poverty trends in Rwanda. Alternatively, if pressed for time, they could just have referred to the evidence already presented in Filip Reyntjens 2015 article and the ROAPE blogs, which already carried out such tests.[1]

Of course, the more sensitive the poverty estimates are to such changes, the more conservative we should be about introducing changes that could artificially ‘engineer’ a poverty reduction merely through the choice of an advantageous consumption basket. Checking the empirical robustness of NISR’s results would, arguably, have been a more valuable contribution to this debate than the World Bank’s incomplete attempt to provide a theoretical justification for why fundamentally different types of poverty lines ‘may’ sometimes hypothetically be comparable.

For, ultimately, the question that needs to be answered in this debate is an empirical one and not a theoretical one. What we want to know is not whether it is possible to find a mathematical formula that is theoretically compatible with the numbers that NISR generates, but whether or not those numbers accurately represent the living conditions of the individuals whose living conditions they claim to represent. To date, the only independent information available to answer this question stems from qualitative data, which appear to quite consistently show that conditions have not improved for significant sections of the population (see Ansoms et al., 2017). The onus should therefore be on quantitative researchers to test and explain if and why their quantitative data are leading to different conclusions, not to merely show that it ‘may’ theoretically be possible to generate numbers that appear to look like the official NISR statistics.

Revised NISR Poverty Estimates

The second step in NISR’s poverty estimation was published 6 months later (NISR 2016), in response to the challenges raised by Reyntjens and others to NISR’s first set of poverty estimations. The timing here is important because it says something about the decision-making process, which in turn provides clues about the motivations and reliability of NISR’s poverty estimates. Indeed, the NISR 2016 report uses a completely different methodology to estimate the 2010-14 poverty trends and abandons earlier efforts to update the poverty line to account for changes in consumption patterns. This suggests that NISR itself recognized that their original trend estimates did not stand up to scrutiny and needed to be discarded in favor of a different methodology. Again, the World Bank euphemistically hints at this when they state that:

Both NISR (2015) and NISR (2016) produce a similar poverty trend (and more or less similar rates). But NISR’s (2016) approach is the one that produces comparable poverty estimates, using a common poverty line and a consistent COLI, one which uses the same budget weights, source data on prices, and base month (World Bank 2015, p.15).

In other words, it appears that the same (invalid) results that had been generated in the original official NISR poverty report, could also be generated using a completely different methodology, which had initially been discarded on the grounds that it failed to capture the important changes in consumption patterns that had occurred between 2001 and 2014. The fact that no mention was made of the alternative methodology in the original report, suggests that this convergence of results was nothing more than a fortunate ex-post coincidence that was discovered after the shortcomings of the original NISR 2015 report had been exposed.

Surprisingly, no explanation has been provided by NISR or the World Bank to explain (a) whether they stand by the initial methodology (and hence results) published in 2015, (b) why they decided to change the estimation method 6 months later and abandoned efforts to update the consumption basket to account for changes in consumption patterns, which had previously been claimed to be indispensable and (c) whether or not the new methodology adopted in 2016 can be trusted despite the fact that it doesn’t capture the crucial changes in consumption patterns.

Whereas the 2015 report updated the quantities of items in the consumption basket to account for changes in consumption patterns between 2001 and 2014, the 2016 report keeps quantities constant and only updates prices. This means that any change in the poverty line will now come solely from the price data. This also means that the accuracy of poverty estimates will depend on whether the chosen inflation rate accurately represents the actual price changes faced by poor people over this period. Consequently, the most important issue at this point should be to ensure that the chosen price data is robust and reliable for the purpose at hand.

A valuable contribution to this debate would therefore have been to carry out robustness checks on the NISR 2016 findings to see whether and to what extent the conclusions reached would have been affected by the choice of one of the other price data sources mentioned in the discussion (the Rwanda Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, ESOKO – a communication platform aimed at smallholder farmers – and EICV). Alternatively, if pressed for time, the World Bank could simply have referred to the evidence already presented by Sam Desiere on this issue on roape.net, which showed that the choice of price data greatly affected poverty results in Rwanda. As stated in our earlier blogpost, this is not a mere technical detail that can be assumed away, but a fundamental question about what goods Rwanda’s poor were actually able to purchase with their income.

Instead, the World Bank takes as given the fact that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) data used by NISR in their 2016 report constitutes a better data source than the one used in the 2015 report and in all other poverty studies, and then proceeds to formalize (not explain or substantiate) the self-evident fact that: if you accept all of the assumptions and data choices made by NISR in their 2016 report, then all of the conclusions reached in that report do hold true. This is hardly a surprising finding and it contributes nothing to advance our understanding of whether living conditions have actually improved for Rwanda’s poor.

Crucially, no arguments have been provided by the World Bank to counter Sam Desiere’s claim that the official CPI data do not constitute an adequate basis for assessing the living conditions of the poor, nor to explain why we should prefer the official CPI data introduced in 2016 over all the alternative price datasets (MINAGRI, ESOKO, EICV) used in previous and subsequent studies.

Once this fact is recognized, the rest of the World Bank paper can essentially be disregarded, since all the subsequent findings derive from, and hinge on, the acceptance of the official CPI as the best price data to use in poverty estimates for Rwanda – a crucial assumption that the authors have omitted.

Other Supporting Evidence

Before concluding, we’ll address two other important and potentially valid points raised in the World Bank paper. First, the authors point to the S2S analysis (survey-to-survey) carried out in the NISR (2016) paper, which, in their opinion corroborates the poverty reduction findings. The S2S approach imputes poverty rates indirectly from non-consumption data on health, education, housing conditions, etc. The authors claim that the S2S ‘confirms that the official poverty trend is reliable’ (World Bank 2018, p.14). Essentially, the S2S applies, in regression form, the same line of argument used by Lee Crawfurd and Dónal Ring , which is to say that, given that non-monetary indicators of wellbeing have improved in Rwanda, it must also be the case that monetary poverty has improved. As such, the S2S is liable to the same criticism that we had raised earlier against Crawfurd and Ring, namely:

this line of argument assumes that other NISR data are more reliable than monetary poverty data. In the context of an argument about the reliability of NISR data, this is an assumption that would need to be tested and proven before being taken as a starting point for any subsequent claim;
There is no reason to assume that monetary poverty and non-monetary wellbeing indicators should follow parallel trends in Rwanda. The evidence produced so far suggests that there may have been a specific policy failure in the agricultural sector, which would presumably have a direct impact on individuals’ nutrition and monetary income. There has been no suggestion that this policy failure has affected access to health care, education or any other dimension of wellbeing. Therefore, it is perfectly possible, and indeed probable, that increases in monetary poverty have been accompanied by improvements in access to health care, education etc.

The second line of argument raised by the authors concerns Engel’s law (which is an observation in economics that argues that as income rises, the amount of income spent on food falls, which may accompany an absolute rise in food expenditure). The authors claim that the fact that the share of food consumption has declined between EICV3 and EICV4 ‘corroborates the poverty decline.’ This would be true, if it weren’t for the fact that the data actually show the opposite of what the World Bank claims, namely it shows that the share of food consumption increased sharply between EICV3 and EICV4. To reach their results, the World Bank have used the invented notion of ‘real food budget shares’, where the nominal budget shares have been deflated by price changes from 2010 to 2014. Since food inflation has been higher than general inflation over this period, they are deflating the nominator (food consumption) more than the denominator (total consumption) in 2014, but not in 2010! This fantastical adjustment alone accounts for the decrease in food consumption share in the World Bank paper.

Had they used the standard indicator, they would have found that from 2010 to 2014, the food consumption share rose from 64% to 67% for the population as a whole, and from 71% to 75% for the bottom two quintiles. If they were worried that auto-consumption might have been over-estimated in the 2014 survey due to erroneous price-imputations (e.g. if EICV price data are unreliable, as the NISR now seems to think), they could have focused on monetary expenditures instead, to stay true to the original formulation of Engel’s law. In that case they would have found that the food expenditure share increased from 46% to 52% for the whole population and from 51% to 58% for the bottom two quintiles.

In other words, whichever way we look at it, when properly calculated, the evidence presented by the World Bank actually strongly supports the claim that poverty increased in Rwanda between 2010 and 2014. The selective and even misleading presentation of supporting empirical evidence by the World Bank in this section, as well as their failure to carry out basic robustness checks or even to state the obvious caveats mentioned above, is, to say the least, disturbing.

Conclusion

The World Bank contribution has the merit of clarifying, although not stating explicitly, that the original EICV4 poverty estimates published by NISR in 2015 were not comparable with EICV3 poverty estimates, and that the official poverty trends published by NISR in 2015 were therefore not valid. Thanks to the World Bank’s careful description of the EICV3 and EICV4 methodologies, it should therefore now be possible to put this part of the discussion to rest.

Secondly, the World Bank confirms that it is (co-incidentally, it seems) possible to generate very similar results to those published by NISR in 2015 by using a completely different (originally discarded) methodology, so long as you use official CPI data to update the poverty line. Unfortunately, the World Bank have forgotten to prove that the CPI data constitutes an adequate basis for updating the poverty line and have failed to respond to Sam Desiere’s claim that it doesn’t. Instead, the World Bank has chosen not to justify or substantiate the self-evident fact that: if you accept all of NISR’s assumptions and data choices, then NISR’s conclusions regarding poverty do hold. This could hardly be considered as a substantial contribution to this discussion, and does nothing to advance, let alone ‘resolve’, the debate opened by Reyntjens in 2015.

Luckily, the World Bank’s analysis does provide some additional clues that may help us settle this debate, once and for all. Indeed, the only substantive piece of empirical evidence presented by the World Bank to support NISR’s claim is the food budget share, which the World Bank claims decreased between 2010 and 2014, providing strong empirical evidence for an improvement in living conditions. The only problem, is that this crucial piece of evidence is presented with a (suspiciously) serious methodological mistake. When this mistake is corrected, the data unequivocally shows that the share of food consumption/expenditures has increased significantly in Rwanda between 2010 and 2014, especially amongst the poorest households, thus providing the strongest independent empirical evidence to-date of an increase in poverty.

So, it seems that, in the end, the World Bank has, unwittingly, achieved its aim of settling the Rwandan poverty discussion after all. Indeed, when taken together, the evidence presented by the World Bank provides compelling evidence that poverty, most likely, did increase sharply in Rwanda between 2010 and 2014. The details presented in the World Bank paper on the estimation process also provides the strongest hints to-date that the ‘mistakes’ in the NISR estimates probably were intentional, or at least not entirely honest and transparent. Finally, the World Bank’s paper helps us to understand its own role in this process, pointing, at best, to a worrying level of leniency and incompetence amongst World Bank staff, and at worst, to outright complicity in the manipulation of Rwanda’s official statistics.

To conclude this response, we would like to suggest that, to redeem itself, the World Bank could use some of its considerable financial resources to help answer some of the outstanding questions on Rwandan official statistics. In particular, we would suggest focusing on explaining why household consumption growth in household survey data has been so low in Rwanda in recent years, compared to the figures used in the official GDP estimates. They may also wish to look into whether increases in total energy consumption and other production inputs are consistent with stated GDP growth figures.

We will leave it to others to comment on the broader political implications of the World Bank lending its name and expertise to an effort ostensibly aimed at providing theoretical cover for the manipulation of official statistics by a notoriously authoritarian regime, rather than contributing to promoting transparency and holding that government accountable for real results.

The authors of this article have asked for anonymity.

Featured Photograph: Food aid distribution in Rwanda, in 2008.

Notes

[1] The World Bank claimed that they were ‘unable to replicate’ Reyntjen’s results but omitted to mention that the same results had been generated in the original ROAPE blog, for which syntax files were publicly available, making ‘replication’ unnecessary.

U.S-China Inter-Imperial Rivalry in Africa

ROAPE

November 16, 2018

The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi addressing at the BRICS Africa Outreach and BRICS Plus Outreach, in Johannesburg, South Africa on July 27, 2018.

In a contribution to the debate on imperialism in Africa, Lee Wengraf argues that there is an urgency for left analysis on the centrality of the sharpening inter-imperial rivalry on the continent. Chinese imperialism in Africa is not identical to that of the U.S but it has been able to take advantage of the door kicked open by neoliberal deregulation and privatization promoted by the West. Wengraf argues that African ruling classes do not merely play a ‘lieutenant’ or ‘comprador’ role in a global order dominated by the West but seek to facilitate capital accumulation for their own ruling classes, a project which is both independent of yet constrained by the major imperial powers. She argues that we must turn towards the resistance of African working classes which demand our solidarity, regardless of which imperial players are involved.

By Lee Wengraf

In the debate on imperialism at roape.net over the past year, contributors have taken up key questions on the relative flows of value and power between the Global North and South. Considerable attention is given in the exchange between John Smith and David Harvey to the question of the ‘draining of wealth’ between these regions of the world. In assessing the current landscape of global imperialism, Smith correctly describes the rapid transformation of the Chinese economy of recent years when he writes, ‘China is much more than merely a very large, fast-growing “emerging nation”’, with global conditions characterized by ‘China’s growing challenge to imperialist domination’ . Yet despite those comments, Smith reduces Harvey’s conclusions about the critical role played by China as privileging the role of ‘geography’ in his analysis:

Yet, in his reply to my critique, Harvey elevates geography above all else, lumping China, whose per capita GDP in 2017 was situated between Thailand and the Dominican Republic, along with South Korea, Taiwan and imperialist Japan into a distinct East Asian ‘power block [sic] in the global economy.’ Given the moribund state of the Japanese economy, whose GDP has grown by an average of less than 1% per annum since 1990, and cognizant of Japan’s explosive economic, political and military rivalry with China, to ask whether this ‘bloc’ is now draining wealth from capitalist Europe and North America is to ask the wrong question.

Harvey, in my reading, is not merely approaching the question of China’s role as simply a matter of geography but rather, more broadly speaking, of the centrality of ‘the East’ in a new phase of capitalist development and a reshaping of the global economy. It is difficult to see, given the explosive developments in China’s economy and its global strategic aims, how asking whether this ‘“bloc” is now draining wealth from capitalist Europe and North America’ is asking the wrong question.

That being said, both Smith’s and Harvey’s contributions sideline the central dynamic critical to contemporary imperialism: that of a sharp inter-imperial rivalry that dominates the globe today. This missing element in the debate has been highlighted brilliantly by Esteban Mora’s contributions on roape.net, when he argues that we should not only be looking for a connection between ‘drained’ countries and countries who ‘drain’, but rather a relationship of mutual profiting between an international capitalist class. Interestingly, Mora criticizes dependency theories which underpin the debate and argues that they cannot capture the totality of relationships in the international market, nor the actual operations of imperialism.

For Marxists, the dynamics of imperialism are not merely driven by the need for access to resources and markets, although undoubtedly this drive plays a role. More fundamentally, these dynamics are an expression of the competitive drive to control those resources over and against imperial rivals. Inextricably tied to those strategic objectives is the importance of political stability or, if necessary, the reliance on military might to back up their interests. As V.I. Lenin wrote a century ago in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the economic competition at the heart of capitalism typically launches nation-states on a collision course, relying on a host of tactics, from ‘free trade’ agreements to outright war; the growing trade war between the U.S. and China is one of the most recent expressions of this rivalry. As Andy Higginbottom points out in his contribution to the ROAPE exchange, ‘China is not yet “way ahead” of Western imperialism, but is rapidly catching up and does threaten to soon begin to overtake them. Right now, there is a whole industry of China watchers, but the point is in what context and against what competition does China rise?’

Those imperial tensions are on full display in sub-Saharan Africa today, where the U.S. and China, but also the European Union nations, the Gulf states and other global powers such as Russia and India are in fierce competition to seize the opportunities presented by ‘Africa rising’s’ new boom. The terrain of the ‘new scramble’ for Africa of the twenty-first century is one of widening networks of investment, resource extraction and militarization across the continent. Foreign multinationals, in partnership with African ruling classes, have greatly accelerated a new rush for raw materials and markets, one remarkably reminiscent of the colonial scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century and, as both Smith and Harvey point out, the super-exploitation of the continent’s working classes. And today’s ‘scramble’ – not unlike its predecessor – has thrown the world’s imperial powers into an ever-sharpening competition worldwide. Above all, today’s conflict is most pronounced between the inter-imperial rivalry between China and the U.S., a global conflict gaining traction across the African continent.

For both China and the U.S., new heights of investment, trade and loans on the continent in the twenty-first century (click here to see recent trends) are expressions of the strategic drive to bind allegiances with African states and secure economic preeminence, that is, access to resources and markets. According to EY data, Africa’s share of global FDI has been rising and increased to 11.4% in 2015, and capital investment logistics, transport and retail rose by 32%. Growth in in the early part of this century was heralded in the business presses as ‘Africa rising,’ yet the commodities crash in the middle of this decade brought on a sharp slowdown in the middle of the decade, followed by a slow recovery. GDP on the continent averaged 1.3% in 2016 and 2.4% in 2017, with projections of 3.1% in 2018, and 3.6% in 2019 (click here to see the World Bank report ). According to the World Bank, gross domestic product (GDP) growth in sub-Saharan Africa has been highly uneven, concentrated in the continent’s largest economies of Nigeria, South Africa and Angola.

The U.S. enthusiastically leapt on the investment bandwagon in Africa with a significant turn towards African oil in the first decade of this century. During this time, African oil exports to the U.S. surpassed those from the Middle East. Although oil extraction in Africa on the part of U.S. corporations is nothing new – Exxon Mobil boasts of its presence on the continent for over a century – the recent surge reflected a qualitatively deeper ‘involvement.’ U.S. oil imports have changed significantly in the past few years with the ‘shale revolution’ and the dramatic growth of its domestic oil industry, especially in Texas. By the middle of the second decade, African exports to the U.S. were a fraction of what they had been just years earlier.

In his contribution to the debate on imperialism, Smith gives center stage to the question of the flows of investment and value between the Global North and South. Smith is correct to argue that wealth and profit is extracted from the Global South through multiple channels, both licit and otherwise. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, illicit capital flows – through transfer mispricing and other tax schemes – play significant roles. Smith writes, ‘As for Sub-Saharan Africa, … [net resource transfers] from this continent to imperialist countries (or tax havens licensed by them) between 1980 to 2012 totaled $792bn, that illicit transfers from Africa to imperialist countries as a proportion of GDP are higher than from any other region, and that capital flight from sub-Saharan Africa is growing by more than 20 percent per annum, faster than anywhere else in the world.’

Taking a step back allows us to see the historical processes behind these conditions: the current dynamic of the extraction of profit from Africa is an expression of both the inheritance of highly lopsided colonial economies – geared towards primary-commodity exports – and massive regulatory weaknesses also inherited from the pre-independence period (I have written elsewhere on roape.net about Walter Rodney’s 1972 historical account of these processes, click here). Neoliberal restructuring – driven by Western international financial institutions and states – exacerbated these historic weaknesses and set the stage for the recovery of global profitability from the period of recession of the 1970s. Above all, neoliberalism cemented the imperial domination of the U.S. over its rivals, through favorable trade and investment terms and an assault on African – and the Global South’s – working classes. As Harvey has written extensively, the neoliberal order has unleashed a struggle for imperial domination by the major powers paired with a race to the bottom for the world’s working classes. It is this competitive dynamic that frames global relations and has facilitated the current ‘new scramble for Africa’ and the unprecedented boom on the continent. As elsewhere, the sharp rivalry in Africa – expressed in this ‘new scramble’ for resources and investments – is by no means only about the West.

As a relatively late competitor on this terrain, China has been able to take advantage of the era of neoliberal assault in sub-Saharan Africa to spur massive economic growth and help boost its own position as the U.S.’s dominant global rival. Most significantly, China’s immense growth has propelled a major drive for raw materials to support its booming industrialization. China’s economy is heavily reliant on African exports, and in 2009, China became Africa’s largest trading partner, with the volume of trade between the two four times larger than with the U.S (see the recent Financial Times articles here). Although U.S. FDI in Africa exceeds that of China’s, the trend for Chinese investment is edging upwards while U.S. FDI has been on the decline. In addition, loans from China’s Exim Bank – heavily focused on high-profile infrastructure projects – dwarf those from the U.S.

This growing economic involvement dictates higher stakes for China, strategically and politically, despite past claims on the part of the Chinese government of political non-interference. Their Belt and Road Initiative, expected to cost approximately $1 trillion worldwide, will include critical development projects in Africa. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation meeting in Beijing in September this year renewed promises on the part of China for high levels of spending, to include support for industrialization. Chinese imperialism in Africa is not identical to that of the U.S.: it has its own dynamics and obligations, including adherence to the One China policy with regards to Taiwan, and other political terms, while often conditioning loans on future production rights. In other words, although China has been able to take advantage of the door kicked open by neoliberal deregulation and privatization on the part of the West, its engagement has its own unique character.

Nonetheless, the centrality of this imperial dynamic is unavoidable. The posture of U.S. imperialism with regards to China in Africa extends back through former U.S. presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama: despite a shift in approach from ‘partnership’ under Obama to the unilateralism of current president Donald Trump, there is a line of continuity in their strategic objectives of strengthening American capital worldwide. The U.S. has recently been joined by Britain and Germany, among others, who openly deride Chinese policy in Africa as ‘debt crisis diplomacy’ – for the promissory nature of its bilateral relations -= while promoting Western investment. Very recently, in fact, Trump unveiled a new program to increase U.S. investment on the continent, a move that can only be understood as a response to China’s involvement in Africa (see the New York Times articles here). Yet Trump’s aggressive nationalism and massive recent hand-outs to ‘his own’ ruling class show that these kinds of policies continue to drive the workers in both the U.S. and across the globe in a race to the bottom. Class inequality only intensified during Africa’s ‘boom’; soaring corporate profits in the U.S. merely paper over a similar class divide (see the recent article here) ), business press celebrations of a tight economy notwithstanding. Contrary to Smith’s take (and Adam Mayer in his contribution to the debate), while the world’s working classes might be differently-positioned within supply and production chains, those same working classes share the same interests within a wider system built on profit.

Above all, this imperial competition is thrown into sharp relief by the heightened militarization of both the U.S. and China, as well as other major powers, across the continent. China’s first overseas military base is located in the tiny East African nation of Djibouti, right alongside of the U.S.’s Camp Lemonnier. China’s contributions to U.N. peace-keeping operations in Africa has escalated massively, as has those from Russia, which has more ‘peacekeepers’ in Africa than France, U.S. and UK combined. This is the landscape of heightening global tensions and the background for the Trump administration’s ‘security first’ agenda, including the rise of the U.S. Africa military command (AFRICOM) – now just over a decade old – and the widening military footprint of the U.S. on the continent, across which troops are scattered in the thousands.

According to investigative journalist Nick Turse, ‘Africa…has seen the most significant increase in special ops deployments. In 2006, the figure for that continent was just 1%; as 2017 ended, it stood at 16.61%. In other words, more commandos are operating there than in any region except the Middle East… Special Operations forces were active in at least 33 nations across that continent last year… Last spring, President Donald Trump loosened Obama-era restrictions on offensive operations in [Somalia]’ (see Nick Turse’s article from earlier in the year). The heightened militarization can only be understood in the context of the higher stakes and sharper competition as economic conflicts are expressed in increasingly dangerous military forms.

Meanwhile, the notion of ‘sub-imperialism,’ as argued by Patrick Bond in the debate, fails to fully explain these inter-imperial dynamics. The so-called ‘emerging’ or sub-imperial powers of China, Russia and India are contending for dominance on the world stage, not content to (merely) ‘lubricate’ the interests of the ‘older’ powers. Likewise, African ruling classes do not merely play a ‘lieutenant’ or ‘comprador’ role in a global order dominated by the West but seek to facilitate capital accumulation for their own ruling classes, a project which is both independent of yet constrained by the major imperial powers. Thus, African political leaders will host military installations and award lucrative extraction contracts in pursuit of their own objectives; goals nonetheless imprinted by the legacies of colonialism and neoliberalism that mean that African economies are unevenly combined and integrated into the global capitalist system. Resource nationalism represents one strategy for African ruling classes to ‘renegotiate’ the terms of that relationship, a strategy itself limited by an inheritance of economies over-reliant on primary commodity exports and world prices that can sustain it.

The urgency for left analysis on the centrality of this sharpening inter-imperial rivalry – as described by Lenin – cannot be overstated. Resistance on the part of African working classes as producers of (surplus) value at the ‘point of extraction’ and – as industrialization spurred by Chinese investment in Africa continues to grow – the point of production must be understood as class struggle demanding solidarity, regardless of which imperial players are involved. As the commodities crash of 2015 showed in no uncertain terms, the systemic crisis of capitalist competition and the dangers of overcapacity will be sharply felt in the ‘export-driven’ economies of sub-Saharan Africa. The new African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement would make Africa the world’s largest free trade zone, with a combined GDP of more than $3.4 trillion and a massive boost to intra-Africa trade. Such an agreement, if it is ever realised, underscores the inadequacy of left projects that envision a ‘delinking’ from the world system. This global competitive drive – fueled by China and the U.S. – is on a collision course, unfolding on a continent armed to the teeth. Equally, the left must mobilize against all forms of racism and oppression in this volatile period, from anti-Chinese xenophobia in Africa to the right-wing mobilization at the U.S.-Mexico border against the Central American migrant caravan. The left must insist upon a shared embrace of our struggles against imperialism and all its current manifestations.

Lee Wengraf is a writer and activist based in New York. Her work on Africa is published in the International Socialist Review, Counterpunch, Pambazuka News, AllAfrica.com, on roape.net and in the Review of African Political Economy. Her new book Extracting Profit: Neoliberalism, Imperialism and the New Scramble for Africa will be launched at the Seminar in Contemporary Marxist Theory at Kings College, on 21 November 2018, 18:00 to 20:00, Bush House, Strand Campus, London (see the details of the launch are here).

Featured Photograph: A BRICS meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa (July 27, 2018).

Financialising the Poor

ROAPE

November 13, 2018

The public debate on South Africa’s ‘social grant saga’ portrays the case as a typical example of political corruption, personal incompetence and corporate greed. However, as Lena Gronbach argues, behind the headlines is an agenda developed by the World Bank in the early 2000s, which sees poverty as a problem of financial exclusion and restrictive financial markets, rather than the result of deeper structural issues and the lack of a regular and adequate income. This has been nothing short of a fundamental shift in development policy.

By Lena Gronbach

In 2012 South Africa’s Social Security Agency SASSA appointed Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), a private financial service provider, as the sole paymaster for the country’s extensive and rapidly expanding social grant programme. This move was designed to address concerns about payment efficiency, high levels of grant fraud, and the fragmented nature of the previous provincial grant payment system (see Christopher Webb’s blogpost here). Social grants are paid to over 17 million beneficiaries in South Africa and represent the main source of income for close to a quarter of the population. In the context of persistently high levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment – the country’s so-called ‘triple challenges’ – social grants thus constitute the government’s flagship poverty alleviation programme and constitute the backbone of social policy in the post-apartheid era.

As part of the new grant payment model implemented by CPS, recipients were issued with biometrically-enabled smart cards which they could use to withdraw their grant money or to make electronic payments. Moreover, they received free bank accounts provided by CPS’ banking partner Grindrod Bank, as well as access to a range of basic banking and payment services. In addition to making the collection of their monthly grant payments more convenient and flexible the new payment model allowed grant beneficiaries – many of whom had previously been excluded from the formal financial sector – to gain access to electronic payment products, insurance, savings and credit offered by formal financial institutions. This represented a major step towards greater financial inclusion which, in turn, was considered a crucial step in the process of addressing South Africa’s legacy of systemic racial economic exclusion and the high levels of informality in the country’s financial sector.

Financial inclusion – blessing or curse?

Financial inclusion is commonly defined as access to useful, appropriate and affordable financial products and services, such as payments, transactions, savings, credit and insurance by individuals and households, delivered in a sustainable and responsible way. In recent years, financial inclusion has become a core concept in the international development discourse and has been adopted and implemented by a broad range of national governments and financial regulators. According to the World Bank, the G20, and a range of other international organizations, developing inclusive financial systems is a key enabler to reducing poverty and inequality. In South Africa, financial inclusion was adopted as part of the country’s Black Economic Empowerment programme and specific financial inclusion targets were set in the 2004 Financial Sector Charter. Yet, many poor households remained without access to a formal bank account which is generally seen as the first step towards broader financial inclusion. In this context, the extensive social grant programme represented an ideal opportunity to ‘bank the unbanked’ at a large scale while increasing the efficiency and transparency of the payment system at the same time.

However, shortly after the implementation of CPS’ new grant payment system, the Black Sash Trust (a veteran civil society organization) discovered a rapid increase in irregular, unauthorized and undocumented debit deductions from beneficiaries’ grant accounts. These deductions – which in some cases consumed the entire grant value – consisted in payments for prepaid electricity and airtime, insurance and microloans. Upon closer investigation more than half of these deductions could be traced back to other subsidiaries of CPS’ parent company Net1 who were leveraging CPS’ direct access to a large and promising customer segment. Numerous grant beneficiaries complained that they had never authorized these payments and were unable to stop them, despite lodging complaints with SASSA, CPS, Grindrod Bank and various financial service providers. However, several attempts to outlaw debit deductions from grant accounts, led by SASSA, the Black Sash and the Department of Social Development, remained unsuccessful and the hastily instituted recourse system struggled to keep up with the thousands of complaints that continued to reach SASSA on a monthly basis.

Moreover, a 2014 Constitutional Court ruling declared the award of the contract to CPS invalid due to procedural flaws in the tender process, which led to a frantic scramble for a new payment solution. After failing to deliver on its promise to develop an in-house payment system, SASSA appointed the South African Post Office (SAPO) as its new paymaster in 2017 in an attempt to regain control over the grant payment system. However, the on-going transition process has been marred by technical glitches and payment delays, and the costs of developing yet another grant payment system are threatening to escalate. In addition, Net1 will continue to sell its financial products and services to South Africa’s poor, thanks to the extensive customer base it managed to establish during its time as national grant paymaster.

‘It’s all about corruption and incompetence’

From 2013 onwards the case was widely reported by the local media which caused a considerable public outcry over Net1’s ‘immoral’ and ‘exploitative’ business practices. Further, the conduct of DSD Minister Bathabile Dlamini and her handling of the social grant crisis was widely criticized as ‘incompetent’, ‘reckless’ and ‘grossly negligent’. In other words, the public debate on South Africa’s ‘social grant saga’ portrayed the case as a typical example of the political corruption, personal incompetence and corporate greed that have become a prominent feature of contemporary South Africa.

In light of the numerous allegations of corruption and the many examples of questionable political decision-making surrounding the case, the above conclusion is by no means unfounded. However, what has generally been overlooked by both journalists and civil society is the fact that the basic idea of using social grants as a vehicle to promote financial inclusion with the help of private financial companies neither originated with corrupt politicians nor with greedy corporations – on the contrary. The concept was developed by the World Bank in the early 2000s and has since been adopted by numerous international organizations, policy makers and national governments. It pushes for for a shift from cash-based to electronic government-to-person (G2P) payments, the introduction of biometric identity verification systems, and the creation of incentives for private financial companies to offer formal financial services to social grant beneficiaries. According the proponents of this ‘G2P strategy’, this will create a triple-win scenario for states, financial companies and the poor alike. It will allow governments to improve payment efficiency, open up new markets for financial companies on the back of lucrative government tenders, and bring the multiple benefits of financial inclusion to the poor.

This strategy, which is largely based on the neoliberal belief in efficiency, cost-savings, private sector involvement and market-based economic policies, represents a fundamental shift in the global development discourse. Moving towards what the celebrated welfare economist, Lena Lavinas, has termed ‘the financialization of social policy’, the poor are increasingly portrayed as self-reliant, empowered and responsible emerging consumers who – provided they receive adequate financial literacy training – will leverage their new-found access to formal financial services to escape the vicious circle of poverty and inequality. The focus of social policy is thus shifting from the provision of free or affordable public services to facilitating access to consumer loans which the poor are then expected to use to purchase these services from private providers. In this context, poverty becomes a problem of financial exclusion and restrictive financial markets, rather than the result of deeper structural issues and the lack of a regular and adequate income.

Interestingly – and controversially – this narrative has retained its popularity despite the growing body of literature and empirical evidence questioning the developmental impact of microloans and warning of rising levels of over-indebtedness among the poor (see Milford Bateman’s blogpost here). In South Africa this phenomenon is illustrated by the high levels of credit-active consumers with impaired credit records and the rapid expansion of unsecured consumer credit to low-income households, including social grant recipients. And while the provision of consumer credit is certainly a lucrative source of income for financial companies – especially if repayment is guaranteed via automated debit orders from bank accounts – evidence from around the world has illustrated the dangers of the credit-centred nature of the current financial inclusion agenda.

A different perspective on South Africa’s social grant crisis

South Africa’s social grant saga vividly illustrates the dangers of this increasingly popular development narrative as well as the limits of the triple-win rhetoric that underlies the ‘G2P strategy’. In addition to the controversial impact on grant beneficiaries, the outcomes for the state and its private contractor have been equally mixed. After spending R10bn (US$700m) on the initial five-year contract with CPS, as well as millions in additional fees for several contract extensions, SASSA will now have to carry the – still unknown – cost of implementing yet another grant payment system. An expert panel tasked with overseeing the payment transition has already warned of a potential cost escalation, stating that it is unlikely that the decision to award the grant payment contract to SAPO will result in the best use of taxpayers’ money. As for Net1, although the company managed to establish a solid customer base for its financial products outside of the SASSA contract they might have to pay back millions made in profits over the past six years. According to the Constitutional Court, who ruled that the award of the grant payment tender to CPS had been ‘unconstitutional’ due to numerous procedural flaws, the company should not be entitled to any financial benefits derived from an unlawful contract.

Rather than merely being an example of political corruption and incompetence – as frequently suggested by the media – South Africa’s ‘social grant saga’ is thus illustrative of a fundamental shift in development policy and in the discourse on the relationship between poverty and finance. Hence, in order to understand the case in terms of its ‘bigger picture’ we need to look beyond the narrow angle of analysis applied by the current public discourse. The ‘financialization of social policy’ is by no means a uniquely South African phenomenon and numerous developing country governments – including Brazil, Mexico, India and Colombia – are currently heading down a similar path. And unless the costly lessons learned from the South African experience serve as a warning to its peers in the global South, other countries may very well end up in a similar situation and discover – yet again – that the promise of a triple-win scenario was simply too good to be true. Ultimately, the question should not be whether governments can create a lucrative business case for financial companies but whether we can make finance work for the poor instead of the other way round.

Featured Photograph: Protest in front of the Cape Town High Court with placards declaring that the wealthy should be taxed to fund housing for the poor (Pierre F. Lombard, 19 September 2012).

Lena Sophia Gronbach is a researcher with the Human Economy Research Project at the University of Pretoria. Her work focuses on the role of financial inclusion and financial technology in the payment of social cash transfers and the impact of financialization on social policy.

To be Bravely Critical of Reality: an interview with Tamás Szentes

ROAPE

November 8, 2018

Tamás Szentes, Professor Emeritus of the Corvinus University of Budapest (the former Karl Marx University), elected full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, is ‘one of the grand old men of development economics.’[1] His first celebrated book in English, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (published first in 1971, republished in nine languages and ten different countries, totalling altogether 16 editions in the first fifteen years of publication) was praised in ROAPE in 1974 as ‘a serious and comprehensive attempt at providing a true political economy of underdevelopment.’ For a while he was one of the contributing editors of ROAPE, and between 1967 and 1971 worked together with ROAPE activists and researchers such as Lionel Cliffe, Peter Lawrence, John Saul, and Issa Shivji, at the University of Dar es Salaam. In an interview for roape.net Tamás Gerőcs asks Tamás Szentes about the years he spent in Tanzania, the hope and political possibilities of the period and his extensive contribution to development economics.

Tamás Gerőcs: What was your intellectual or political background before you went to Tanzania? And why to Tanzania? Where did you work before 1967, and did you publish earlier anything related to Africa?

Tamás Szentes: After having graduated at the Karl Marx University of Economic Science, Budapest in 1955, where I wasn’t employed for political reasons, I got a job – thanks to my professor of the history of economic theories, Antal Mátyás – in the Publishing House of Economics and Law, as an editor. My first publication (in 1959) was about the views of David Ricardo, as part of a book, but I wrote quite a lot for myself and a few friends, not publishable, moreover very risky in the early 1950s (such as a study of the real nature of the soviet system in 1951). As a matter of fact, my interest has always focussed on social science theories and social systems – not only from an economic point of view. From my professor Mátyás, who also ran a seminar on the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, I have learnt to approach both historically and critically all theories, even the best ones, as none of them can fully capture reality which is infinitely complex and ever changing. After the Year of Africa, in 1960, when a number of colonies gained independence, my interest turned to such countries, particularly those somehow attempting a pattern of development different from both the capitalist West and the communist East.

Owing not only to this interest but also to the fortunate fact, namely editing the book of a Dean of my university, who helped to secure me a senior lectureship in the Department of International Economic and Political Relations, my new job involved research and teaching on Africa and the Third World. Besides several book-chapters and articles, I authored a monograph on East Africa (in Hungarian), published in 1963. As a result, I was heavily involved in the operation of an Afro-Asian Research Group at the university, and what followed, in that of the Afro-Asian Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that was established in 1963 and renamed as the Institute of World Economics in 1973.

When Professor Knud Eric Svendsen, an appointed head of department for the newly established but not yet operating University College of Dar es Salaam, was mandated by Julius Nyerere to recruit professors in Poland and Hungary, known to be rebels against the Moscow-line, and relatively independent of it, I was one of those recommended to him, and was interviewed. Soon I received an offer and contract for four years to become the Head and Professor of the Economics Department.

As your book in English, namely The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, obviously grew out of your experiences and work in Tanzania, how and to what extent were you empirically or intellectually inspired there to write it?

I must say that the conditions for research as well as the atmosphere both politically and intellectually were excellent at the time at the University of Dar es Salaam. My department as well as the Economic Research Bureau led by Gerry Helleiner, had considerable funds to order books, documents, etc., to make field research, and to contact people involved in political leadership in the country. We also had regular staff seminars to discuss research results and to exchange views. The very fact that in those years, after the Arusha Declaration, Tanzania attracted a number of highly qualified and progressive minded scholars, obviously contributed enormously to the exceptionally good intellectual atmosphere in Dar. While the academic staff itself involved such eminent members, among them not only those already mentioned, but also Arnold Kettle, Robert and Ann Seidman, John Loxley, Leonard Berry, Walter Rodney, Reginald H. Green, Ian Livingstone, G Routh, M. A. Bienefeld, etc., several other internationally well-known scholars came also to participate in conferences, to deliver public lectures. Such as Paul Streeten, Dudley Seers, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, René Dumont, Brian van Arkedie, Dharam Ghai, etc. President Julius Nyerere and his aim to develop democratically a genuine type of socialist system of society, different from those in the ‘East’, had obviously gained not only wide-spread interest internationally, but also – among progressive thinkers – a great sympathy.

**Tamás J. Szentes with J. Jedrusek at the University of Dar es Salaam**

You mean among left-wing people, don’t you?

Mostly but not exclusively. Anyway, nowadays ‘left-wing’ is not an unambiguous term.

But did you belong to the obviously leftist theoretical stream which blames Western capitalism for the underdevelopment of the ‘South’, and explains it by dependence?

Yes, but also no, or not precisely. Prof. Paul Streeten in his articles on the two, opposite theoretical streams of development economics,[2] honoured me in mentioning my name among those eleven scholars (namely Samir Amin, E. A. Brett, F. E. Cardoso, Frantz Fanon, Celso Furtado, Johann Galtung, Keith Griffin, Colin Leys, Ann Seidman and Osvaldo Sunkel) who share the views expressed by André Gunder Frank and also Raul Prebisch, Hans Singer, Gunnar Myrdal, Albert Hirschman and Francois Perroux, rejecting the theory of linear development, to stress the responsibility of the rich developed countries for underdevelopment of the poor. What I have obviously shared, with them, besides the rejection of the concept of linear development and the historical responsibility of the colonial powers, is a very critical evaluation of the prevailing world order as well as the existing social systems both in the West and the East.

However, the views among these scholars were quite different in their details, particularly regarding solutions, if a new world order was required for example, and mine also differed from theirs (even from those of my friends, such as Samir Amin, Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein or others). Thus, I complemented my critique of the conventional theories of development economics, which appeared in my first book in English, by a critical survey in other books (see Theories of World Capitalist Economy. A critical survey of conventional, reformist and radical views in 1985, and World Economics 1: Comparative Theories and Methods of International and Development Economics in 2002) and each of the different main theoretical streams they seemed to belong to (such as the ‘school of dependencia’, neo-Marxism and ‘new-left’ stream, too).

Does it mean that you denied the dependence of underdeveloped countries, and disagreed with the ‘world-system approach’?

Not at all, but I found it insufficient and one-sided to point to dependence and explain underdevelopment by external factors only, because the latter are interrelated with internal ones, and dependence have different forms, varieties which provide chances for manoeuvring, or even reducing its overall intensity. While world-system approach is necessary, it should not be exclusive, and must not mean that national economies are merely virtual units, or the level of analysis and actions should be limited to the global system.

Taking up this last point, and looking back from today, how much can Tanzania’s modernization and economic transformation under Nyerere be regarded as successful? Did the Nyerere Government have the power to carry them out, or were there any external or internal obstacles that kept the country on a dependent path? Where can we place the ‘Nyerere Years’ or the ‘Arusha Declaration’ in history?

There were considerable achievements in modernization and economic transformation, albeit not without shortcomings (some of which were discussed in our staff seminars), while Nyerere’s aim to create a kind of socialist system based upon traditional collectivism (like ‘ujamaa’) has obviously failed, for both internal and external reasons.[3] I considered the objective manifested in the Arusha Declaration as one, and perhaps the most sincere and honest, of those similar attempts in the 1960s and 1970s in the Third World, which all failed partly because of the international conditions, forces and effects, and partly due to mistaken policy of the domestic ruling stratum.

At the Dar es Salaam conference organized by ROAPE this year, an interesting debate emerged about whether the regime built by Nyerere was a state-socialist one which sought to break away from the dominance of capitalist powers, or was it a state-capitalist regime, which promoted modernization and the development and integration of a capitalist national economy? We also have similar debates on the left in Eastern Europe: whether 1949-1989 was a state-capitalist or a state-socialist experiment.

I think we have to be careful in making use of the terms ‘state-socialist‘ or ’state-capitalist’ in distinguishing a socio-political or economic system from another one, partly because ‘capitalism’ as such has many different variants, and is permanently changing, while socialism in reality has never and nowhere come into existence yet, and partly because the above terms substantially refer to the role of the state, particularly in development and modernisation. Both terms primarily indicate a transition only, the direction of which may be declared and expressed in ideology, but the outcome of the transition process is necessarily questionable and undetermined.

Over-simplifications go hand in hand with over-generalisations, which characterise ideologies and are to be refrained from in science. Such as the purist perception of capitalism vs. socialism as independent entities contrasting each other in all respects, the transformation of which cannot succeed by gradual reforms. Systems with exclusively and perfectly compatible components exist in pure models of ideologies only, not in social reality. The existing socio-economic systems of all countries of the world (as well as the world itself) incorporate heterogeneous segments, combine mechanisms governed by different rules and reconcile opposite needs or principles.

What is called state-capitalism is a particularly mixed and changeable phenomenon with contradictory elements and tendencies. It may pave the way for the unfolding of capitalism proper (by substituting state accumulation and investments for private ones) or may turn to the so-called state-socialism (by setting limits for private capital and decreasing social inequalities). These two variants have also common features and can easily change over from one to the other.

Socialism-orientation, or state-socialism in underdeveloped countries necessarily face a double task, which are more or less contradictory requirements, namely to catch up with the developed countries (often called ‘modernization’) and to reduce social inequalities by helping the poor and disadvantaged. Such systems, if isolated from and confronting to a hostile capitalist environment, may, almost inevitably, become militarized, dictatorial and bureaucratized (like the soviet one under Stalin), or if they remain open to the outside world, cooperating with dominant forces of foreign capital, can easily be undermined by the latter and their domestic clients, resulting in violent coups d’état or replacement of the leadership. The most typical and frequent oversimplification undoubtedly follows from the divorce of the external and internal factors in the explanation of the rise, defeat or transformation of social systems. It obviously neglects the historical changes in the international conditions of national development, the widening and deepening of global interdependencies.

How and in what sense did your personal experiences in Tanzania and other African countries influenced your views, theoretical orientation and academic career? For what can you be grateful to Africa?

I can thank Africa for a lot. My experiences there have certainly reinforced my deep interest in social science as a whole, beyond economics, and my very views, increasing conviction about the requirement of a historical, critical and dialectically holistic approach to reality. I also made invaluable acquaintances, numerous friends there who also helped my career later on. Thanks to them and also to the success of my book, in the following decades, until almost the end of the century when I stopped travelling abroad, I was regularly invited as an expert in various advisory, expert and steering committees to many different international bodies (such as ILO, UNESCO, IDEP, etc.) and as an invited speaker in many conferences of various international scientific associations and funds (such as the Association of Third World Economists, Lelio Basso International foundation, International Foundation for Development Alternatives, the South Centre, etc.).

How did your African experiences effect your teaching and academic activity at home, in Hungary?

Having returned to my university in Budapest I initiated and led an alternative multidisciplinary bloc of courses called ‘Development Studies’ which became so popular among students that we had to limit their number. With a colleague of mine and one of my best students, namely Ferenc Miszlivetz (today Professor and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Kőszeg, Hungary) who actually initiated it, we produced as a semi-samizdat series of readings under the same title which presented the students selected writings of foreign scholars (e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein, Paul Streeten, Arghiri Emmanuel, etc.), otherwise unavailable for them at that time, we included the writings of Samir Amin and Gunder Frank whose works were not publishable because of their anti-soviet stand. After the ‘system-change’ when an English program was established at the university, for several years I had regular courses on development economics, too. Later on, at the Academy, when I was the head of the social science section for two terms, I initiated a permanent committee on international and development economics, which is now the interdisciplinary, ‘International and Development Studies.’ (I am its Honorary President.)

Let us return to the case of the University of Dar es Salaam, where ROAPE held a workshop on radical political and economic transformation, the intellectual birthplace of the review! What innovations, if any, did you suggest or realise there at that time, for example in the teaching program, as compared to that of the other two East-African university colleges? Did you replace the standard Western teaching material by readings of Marxist-Leninist political economy, for example?

As to the teaching of Marxist-Leninist political economy only, while it was expected, particularly by some militant leftist colleagues, I taught the fundamentals of economics in a historical framework embracing all the main theoretical streams (from Mercantilism through Classical, Marxian, and Keynesian theories to neo-classical economics, including also institutionalism), evaluating each of them critically, but also pointing to useful lessons from each. As a matter of fact, I have always rejected any exclusiveness, and while I have always appreciated, and been heavily influenced by the works of Marx, I had been, from the very beginning, critical of such Marxism as represented by ’Marxism-Leninism’, particularly in its Stalinist sense.

What readings did you use and recommend? And were the students able to attain the required knowledge in such a course?

I had to make cyclostyled readings, for which I partly wrote, partly translated some text from the book of Antal Mátyás. Our students, by being exempted from learning some irrelevant details, concepts or models, performed very well in general, that the same external examiner also examining the university colleges of Uganda and Kenya at the same time, noted as a surprise in his report that our students understood the fundamental concepts and methods of economics better than those in the other regional colleges. Anyway, it was my strong conviction that our primary role was in teaching students to think, instead of presenting them ready-made ‘universal’ formulas and mathematical models. In the 1969 international conference on the teaching of economics in African universities I stressed that ‘one of the greatest mistakes would be to teach only one particular theory…Instead, all important schools in economic theory should be taught. …it is necessary to put the theories into a general historical framework and to explain their origin and interrelations…’

Were you against mathematics as a language of economics?

By no means. Quite the opposite. As another innovation, quite contrary to conventional practice elsewhere, I made compulsory for all those students choosing an economics major to also take mathematics and statistics. In the same conference in 1969 I also stressed that ‘any attempt to diminish the significance and weight of the economic mathematics and statistics in teaching would inevitably lead to a decrease in the quality of the new graduates.’ While I also noted that ‘mathematical formulas, no doubt, have the advantage that it is easier to memorise them, and they give a direct basis for practical calculations.’ Yet I called attention to ‘a tremendous danger in teaching economic principles and concepts by and through mathematical formulas’ because such formulas and models necessarily simplify the economic interrelations, conceal the original presumptions, and give the impression of scientific exactitude.

What was your relationship with the students like? What was the most interesting experience you had as the head of the department of economics?

In the first weeks of teaching I experienced what I had been told beforehand to expect, namely the lack of discipline, manifested in wandering in and out during lectures. To overcome it, I introduced the practice that after having arrived a few minutes before the lecture was due to start, I would stand with my back to the students until the last second, and then turned around to face them, and always interrupted my speech whenever a student came or left the lecture theatre. Surprisingly not only for others but even for myself, very soon the students’ discipline was better than at my home university. Students also helped a lot in my work, particularly their elected representatives who forwarded majority opinion on the teaching program and lecturers when participating in department meetings. This was, by the way, another innovation that time, almost causing a scandal, as student representation was not yet an accepted institutional practice in any university.

After a half century, what would you send as a message to the students or the lecturers of the University of Dar es Salaam, many of whom will certainly read this interview?

I send of course my best wishes to them and their country. If I can suggest anything in general, it follows from my life experiences: Let them be bravely critical of reality, both of society, and politics and let them do their best to improve both.

Tamás Gerőcs is a political economist, currently employed as a Research Fellow at the Institute of World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Featured Photograph: Tamás J. Szentes in Tanzania in 1968

Notes

[1] Quoted in The Introduction written by Jomo K. S. and Erik S. Reinert in The Origins of Development Economics, Tulika Books: New Delhi and ZED Books: London, 2005. P.19.

[2] See ’L’évolution des théories relatives au développement’ Problemes Économiques, No. 1546, 9/1977, and ’Development Economics: the Intellectual Divisions’ Eastern Economic Journal, Vol. XI, No. 3 /1985.

[3] Ujamaa was the name of the concept that formed the basis of Julius Nyerere’s developmental policies in Tanzania after independence. The term means ’familyhood’ refering to the type of socialist development that differed from Soviet-type socialism.

Britain, Brexit and Africa

ROAPE

October 31, 2018

Examining the likely outcome of Brexit for Africa, Dirk Kohnert exposes the myths of a rosy new dawn for the continent’s relationship with the UK. Behind the ‘altruistic’ Post-Brexit rhetoric of the British government about assisting pro-poor growth in Africa, the fact is that the UK is a major champion of a wide network of notorious tax havens in UK’s overseas territories, crown dependencies, and island economies of its former empire. The prospects do not look good.

By Dirk Kohnert

The controversial discussion on the potential impact of the Brexit, that is, the impending withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union on Africa by the end of March 2019, has been characterized by high-flying illusions on the part of the proponents and grim predictions on the part of the sceptics. The British government’s vision of a ‘Global Britain’ relies heavily on its reinforced cooperation with Commonwealth nations, to which 19 out of 54 African states belong, including the most populous and powerful states, Nigeria, South Africa, as well as Kenya, Egypt and Ghana. However, up to now, commerce with Commonwealth nations represents just 9 per cent of UK foreign trade. Whether London would be able to increase this share substantially by liberalizing the markets in reducing tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade, remains highly questionable. It remains unclear what the UK could offer, which competing global players with increasing interest in African resources and markets, such as China, India, the US and the EU, do not already have on their agenda.

What exactly are the issues at stake for Africa? In this blogpost I focus on five issues that could arguably have the greatest impact on sustainable cooperation between both the UK and Africa and the EU and Africa: market access, foreign direct investment (FDI), aid, security, and partnership.

Better market access?

For most African Commonwealth countries, Britain has been by far the biggest market for their exports. London currently claims that it will protect nascent African industries with its post-Brexit trade policy, which is supposed to stand in stark contrast to the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). However, in the case of a hard or ‘no-deal’ Brexit, African countries will no longer have preferential access to the UK if London does not succeed in negotiating new bilateral agreements with African governments in advance. In view of the limited time left before March 2019, this appears unlikely. The exclusion from preferential access to the UK holds not just for signatories of the EPAs, but also for participants in the EU free trade agreements and the EU general system of preferences, including the duty-free quota-free market access under the Everything-But-Arms initiative. Major adverse consequences are predicted for countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, and Mauritius, as the UK accounts for approximately 25 to 30 per cent of their exports to the EU. London will have to get its priorities right in concentrating its negotiations first on the biggest Commonwealth players like Canada, Australia and South Africa. For the rest, Britain will probably be more selective, trying to focus on bilateral deals, preferentially with those African countries that are most important to its own economy.

More Foreign Direct Investment?

On the occasion of the G20 summit in Hamburg in July 2017, British prime minister Theresa May announced sweeping post-Brexit programs to reduce African countries’ reliance on aid. London envisaged increasing Africa’s long-term prosperity by combined trade-enhancing programs such as ‘aid for trade’, financial instruments, and the promotion of FDI in Africa. The amount of UK investment in Africa, which more than doubled between 2005 and 2014 from GBP 20.8 billion to GBP 42.5 billion, was meant to be further enhanced by Brexit. Industry, mining, and financial services have been the main industrial sectors receiving British FDI, accounting for 54.4 per cent and 34.3 per cent of total UK FDI into Africa in 2014, respectively. Last, but not least, UK investment in Africa, just as the distribution of Britain’s mineral wealth on the continent, is restricted to a very small elite in the UK and Africa. British companies control large areas of African land enclosing key mineral reserves including gold, copper, platinum, coal, and diamonds. About 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange – most of them British – have mining operations in 37 sub-Saharan African countries. They collectively control over US $1 trillion worth of Africa’s most valuable resources. British companies could be inclined to negotiate in the future independently of perceived or real EU ethical restrictions which would allow these inequalities to aggravate even more. The ever-increasing use of tax havens by wealthy British citizens might be taken as an indicator of such unrestricted ethics. Apparently, behind the ‘altruistic’ Post-Brexit rhetoric of the British government about assisting pro-poor growth in Africa, the fact is that the UK still supports a wide network of notorious tax havens in UK’s overseas territories, crown dependencies, and island economies of its former empire.

As a complement to increased FDI, Prime Minister Theresa May also announced at the G20 summit in Hamburg that the British government will seek to boost the integration of African countries into global financial markets post-Brexit. Among other things, she promised to contribute GBP 60 million for the construction of a strong and transparent African financial market. According to Theresa May’s rather elusive announcement, the UK will seek to stimulate financial innovations, to enhance the autonomy of the African banking sector, and to allocate financial resources where they are most needed.

Increased aid for Africa?

Although Prime Minister Theresa May reaffirmed on several occasions in 2017 and 2018 the British government’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid (enshrined in law in 2015), it is likely that Brexit could result in a decrease in UK aid for Africa, for the following reasons. The divorce from the EU will deprive the UK of substantial multiplier effects in relation to aid. The British government apparently saw the EU as a catalyst for enhancing its own aid. In 2013, the Senior European Experts Group, an informal group of former high-ranking British diplomats and civil servants who regularly publish high quality briefing and opinion papers about EU issues, stated ‘that statistics about the strength of the UK economy, such as it being the seventh largest economy, “flattered to deceive”, and that by working through the EU the UK was able to maintain influence and prosperity “in an era where the relative balance of global growth, population and power is moving away from the UK and Europe”’. Deprived of this, Britain’s willingness to fulfil its aid pledges could decrease significantly.

Under these conditions, London would probably focus on hand-selected strategic partners and existing bilateral ties, particularly with individual African Commonwealth states such as South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya at the expense of the poorest African countries. In addition, it could broaden its range of bilateral partners at the expense of multilateral development cooperation of the UN, IMF, World Bank etc.

Enhanced security for Africa?

The British government has repeatedly claimed that its defense expenditures are the largest in the EU, that it has the largest defense industry, and that it has contributed to most of the operations and missions of the EU Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). However, London apparently exaggerated its input in order to enhance its bargaining position for a new post-Brexit security partnership with the EU, which would include the issues of defense, cybersecurity, and external migration. Britain provided just 2.3 per cent of all CSDP missions. This is considerably less, for example than France, Spain, or Italy’s contributions to civilian and military operations. Moreover, the UK did not contribute to most missions in Africa, apart from the mission at the Horn of Africa, intended to secure the seaways from Europe to Asia. Instead, France assumed the lead in nearly all of these missions. To sum it up, the direct effect of Brexit on EU security operations in Africa will probably be rather small.

A Partnership of Equals or Collective Clientelism?

Some Brexiteers and African politicians alike have expressed their hope for a golden era with a rediscovered but deeper and more partnership-like post-Brexit Commonwealth relationship. London could use the chance to co-operate with the newly created African Continental Free Trade Area , approved by 44 African governments in Kigali in March 2018. African governments envisage using their negotiating advantage as in-demand partners to press for more protection of their domestic markets and infant industries. This strategy might work in areas where British products and services do not compete with African markets. However, it is questionable whether the UK will allow for less rigid tariff-rate quotas and non-tariff barriers to trade, more flexible rules of origin, or greater protection against British service exports, if the British industry could be affected negatively. Moreover, a more liberal attitude on Britain’s part concerning imports from Africa – for example, with regard to quotas and other non-tariff barriers – could increase the cost of future trade agreements between the UK and the EU, especially if London has to leave the EU customs union. Although Britain is proud of its strong bilateral relations with the Commonwealth network, these relations, especially with the most important African players, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, have been not without tensions – for example, concerning brain drain from the former British colonies to the UK. Under these conditions, a partnership of equals between the UK and Africa and a win-win situation for both sides is highly unlikely, if not entirely fanciful. Moreover, Brexit will not only challenge European integration but will also put African regional integration efforts at risk.

Conclusion

Brexit is not easy going. Unfortunately, for some of those who voted for it in favor of a truly ‘Global Britain’, or a nostalgia to the ‘golden times’ of colonial British Africa, the reality is unlikely to match their imaginings. On 28 August 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May started her first three-day visit to Africa in order to build up new trade relations with key nations ahead of Brexit. On her tour of South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, she presented ambitious plans that would allegedly deliver a major Brexit boost for British firms and investors and promised to turn Britain into a truly global nation doing business around the world in economies with massive and growing potential. Yet, time is running out for the United Kingdom. The story of the ‘betrayal’ of the Commonwealth with the EU-entry of the UK in the 1970s, often used by Brexiteers, is a myth. It is a desperate device used to fool the overwhelmingly disenchanted British poor who voted for Brexit as well as governments of African Commonwealth nations.

Dirk Kohnert’s full paper on which this blogpost is based, Britain and Africa: Heading for the Brexit Rocks is available here.

Dirk Kohnert is Associated Senior Expert at the Institute of African Affairs (IAA), German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany. He is also the retired deputy director of IAA (1991-2011) and former editor of the journal Africa Spectrum.

Featured Photograph: Celebrated Kenyan cartoonist Victor Ndula, ‘Brexit and Africa’ (31 March, 2017).

Debating Africa’s Socialist Legacy

ROAPE

October 24, 2018

Ahead of the third ROAPE workshop in the series on radical political economy, to be held in Johannesburg in November, Peter Lawrence looks at the debate on the legacy of Julius Nyerere and socialism at the second meeting in Dar es Salaam. The Dar workshop, as was the case with the first one in Accra, was distinguished by the serious analysis by both scholars and activists and those who are both, of the prospects for a radical shift in political economic strategy. The gathering in Tanzania faced head on the issue of imperialism in its contemporary form and what radical forces of the socialist left are up against. The conversation will continue in South Africa.

By Peter Lawrence

In my interview with Issa Shivji at the Dar workshop he referred to the proceedings as a ‘conversation’ and urged that the conversation be continued. Although I started this blog a while ago, I was prompted to finish it by seeing a newspaper report that President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had launched the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership Centre – a centre for passing on knowledge especially to tomorrow’s leaders. How ironic, as Nyerere’s last act of leadership was to step down as Tanzania’s president in 1985 after 23 years as Tanganyika’s and then Tanzania’s leader. Museveni, meanwhile, the former Marxist revolutionary student at the University of Dar es Salaam who received his degree from Nyerere, has been President of Uganda for the 32 years since 1986 and is regularly alleged to be keeping his seat warm for his son.

However, even if Museveni’s way of celebrating Nyerere’s legacy has a whiff of hypocrisy, to say the least, one of the most striking aspects of the Dar workshop, which continued the exciting work of the first one in Accra five months earlier, was the continuing appeal of the socialist ideas and policies associated with ujamaa and Nyerere. However critical of his leadership, socialists, let alone Marxists, might have been, the period of socialism and self-reliance in Tanzania has left its mark on subsequent generations. Compared with the neoliberal succession, the Ujamaa period appears as some kind of golden age (see the blogpost by Tamás Gerőcs). This is especially true in the understanding of leadership with the then existing ‘code of conduct for leaders’ which kept accumulation through office in check. Policies in the period after the Arusha Declaration largely maintained the ambitious objectives of Nyerere and the TANU party, at least for some years. Together with attempts to create a socialist economy and society through public ownership and rural cooperation, Nyerere’s refusal to follow IMF and World Bank injunctions, maintained consistency in leadership positions for a long time. The workshop showed that the ideas underpinning ujamaa and opposition to capitalism and imperialism are still alive among a younger generation.

The Arusha Declaration suggested a way of building a socialist society out of the organisational characteristics of a pre-capitalist one but its implementation unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, replicated the top down statism of western social democracy. It also replicated some aspects of state socialism of the East, with nationalised companies, forced villagisation and one-party government, although with an offer of choice between candidates from the same party. Although at the time criticism from the Left focused on the downsides of collaboration with foreign investors and western foreign aid as well as on growing party authoritarianism, it was interesting in the workshop to hear the praise, if not nostalgia, for what Nyerere tried to do. There was a sense of his trying to build from below, but also of imposing from above, of impatience with the slow pace of progress.

This confusion was increasingly evident as the policy of promoting voluntary ujamaa was, with increasing impatience at its slow pace, replaced by one which forced farmers and pastoralists into villages. The confusion continued for me when some 16 years ago I presented a paper on Rural Cooperation at a conference in Leeds in the United Kingdom to mark the retirement of Lionel Cliffe. Participating in the session was Joan Wicken, long-time personal assistant to Nyerere. When I referred to Operation Dodoma as the first of the attempts to organise ujamaa villages from the top, she admonished me for referring to them as ujamaa villages. They were villages organised so that services, especially water (in a water-stressed region) and health, could be supplied on an economically effective basis; this wasn’t ujamaa but simply about economies of scale in providing public services. But certainly the local press and most of us in the country then, thought this was part of the programme of ujamaa vijijini (socialist villages). I remember one newspaper report however, that described how some pastoralists were not allowed to bring their cattle into the new villages because the cattle would compete with the people for water. So maybe Joan Wicken was right: this had nothing to do with ujamaa as conceived by Nyerere, but maybe did as understood by those party and state officials and journalists respectively implementing and reporting the programme.

One of the important aspects of the Tanzanian case was that Nyerere found space to pursue independent development strategies. Whether or not ujamaa was socialist, its success would have been a challenge to the US and to capitalism, especially if other African countries followed suit. But it was the era of the cold war, and so Tanzania was able to play one side against the other. The most spectacular example of that was the US funded road from Tanzania to Zambia, and the Chinese funded railway linking the port of Dar es Salaam with the Zambian copperbelt, both giving Zambia a means of avoiding exporting copper through Smith’s Rhodesia and Portugal’s colony, Mozambique.

The Dar workshop, as was the case with the first one in Accra, was distinguished by the serious analysis by both scholars and activists and those who are both, of the prospects for a radical shift in political economic strategy. While the Accra workshop was concerned more with alternative strategy, the Dar gathering faced head on the issue of imperialism in its contemporary form and what progressive forces of the socialist left are up against. Not that we didn’t have a good idea already.

The hegemony of US imperialism in the form of the global corporates especially in mining, the increasing militarisation of Africa through US bases, the emergence of China as an economic force in Africa, whether China could be perceived in the same light as the US, the power of the global corporates and the financialisation of everything – all these issues were raised and discussed. With imperialism came the issue of class alliances and whether we could talk of the working class in the same way as before. Where were the progressive forces to emerge if not from an organised working class? Could a peasant-worker alliance be built, or did we need to think more widely about mobilising the precariat or building up from community-based struggles?

Whether the space exists now for a radical left-wing government to pursue an independent political and economic strategy as Tanzania attempted to after 1967 is a good question which requires greater attention from all of us in the future. Global capitalist forces, economic, political and military, are so powerfully stacked up against the vast majority of the world’s populations with even China now looking as though it is just another global player and no longer providing solidarity to radical governments. Even so, there is perhaps still room for local variations and governments may have more power to resist than they seem prepared to risk. There are of course too many leaders with many vested interests, for example, in encouraging the mining of natural resources by global corporations, and therefore have little interest in the welfare of those who lose land in the process and cannot find other means to make a living. There is then understandably some nostalgia for leaders like Nyerere who tried to limit if not prevent politicians using the State as a means to accumulate wealth.

A serious question for the Left everywhere is where capitalism is going. For a long time we have been fond of predicting its collapse and every time there is a crisis, we think this is the revolutionary moment. Then capitalism shows its resilience. But how long can it continue to do so? Some analysts from the Left have talked of ‘post-capitalism’ as beginning to arise out of the contradiction in advanced capitalist societies between social relations of production and the level of productive forces. The latter have now developed to the point where social relations have to change to find a way to co-exist with the impact of an increasingly robotised provision of ever cheaper (even free) goods and services.

The impact on the advanced economies could result in the collapse of capitalism through the failure of capital to generate profits, and a world of short working weeks and socialist control of production. It could also result in some form of authoritarian state to protect the embattled plutocracy and their hangers-on. The impact of the new technologies on countries like Tanzania needs to be explored so that political forces that seek a push towards socialism can be prepared when the time comes. The latest World Bank report argues that the new technologies will be job creating as long as populations gain a good education. But without a system that mobilizes resources to ensure equal access to such an education and distributes the gains of new technologies equitably, these jobs will be created for the privileged minority that can afford a good education. And we know that capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism, cannot do this.

The conversation which began in Accra continues next month in Johannesburg. Watch this space!

Peter Lawrence is Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Keele University and has taught in Tanzania, Uganda, and Canada and spent periods of research in Tanzania, Hungary, Spain and India. He is a founding member of ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Mwalimu Julius Nyerere speaks to the Senate in the United States in 1985.

Marxism in Nigeria

ROAPE

October 19, 2018

Conference on Capitalism, Imperialism and Revolutions

Volume 1 of Karl Marx’s Capital was published in 1867. In that volume, Marx’s major preoccupation was the analysis of the capitalist process of production where he elaborated his version of the labor theory value, surplus value and exploitation which would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III were published posthumously by Frederick Engels.

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was written by Lenin in 1916 and published in 1917. It was in Zurich that Lenin wrote this important theoretical work. He argued that the merging of banks and industrial cartels gave rise to finance capital. According to him, in the last stage of capitalism, the pursuit of greater profits led to the export of capital. Capital export also led to the division of the world between international monopoly firms and amongst European States who colonized large parts of the world in support of their national capitals. These developments constituted what he called “Imperialism”, an advanced stage of capitalism.

Since the publications, capitalism has, as predicted by Marx and Lenin, continued to go from one crisis to another. Since Lenin articulation of the thesis of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, capitalism has become rarefied in what is today known as globalization. Yet however, working class revolutions only occurred in a handful of countries. Many of these revolutions have not only suffered subversion and stagnation but have also experienced reversals. Why has this been so?

In the 1970s and 1980s, the teaching of Marxism and related philosophies shared spaces with right wing philosophies and political theories in many African Universities. Today, Marxism which is expected to shape theory and praxis has become a marginal paradigm in academic discourses. This may have affected the quantity and quality of Marxist students, scholars and activists in many African countries and around the world. Why is this so?

The conference offers us an opportunity to interrogate contemporary developments and reflect on the future of Marxism. It is for this reason that we are looking at capitalism, imperialism and revolutions.

The conference is going to be held at Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria from 1 – 4 November, 2018.

For more information please email marxism2017ng@gmail.com and to find out about the conference click here.

The Great Lacuna: Capitalism in Africa

ROAPE

October 19, 2018

Jörg Wiegratz asks why there is such silence in much of African Studies on capitalism. He wonders why capitalism does not feature more prominently in titles of major Western conferences on Africa, and articles of main African Studies journals. In this blogpost he asks why does this analytical lacuna exist? Wiegratz calls for a discussion and explanation of this state of affairs. On the central question of capitalism, the African Studies community, he argues, in Western Europe, and across the Global North, is largely inactive and silent? When it comes to an explicit, focused and sustained collective exploration, about the many, multifaceted features of contemporary capitalism on the continent, and about the characteristics of African society as a capitalist society, there is a gaping silence.

By Jörg Wiegratz

Imagine an interested critical undergraduate student living in Berlin who has never engaged with what we call ‘African Studies’ but is very curious about what this group of scholars is up to. This student has only a little time at hand, and so decides that a good way to get an overview is to check the titles of the major Africa conferences in Western Europe. After all, she has a lot of respect for this region’s academia: ‘Aren’t a lot of universities from this part of the world in top places in the global university rankings that I have heard so much about?’ After 40 minutes the student concludes the search: ‘Judged by the titles, lots of things seem to be going on in Africa. There is reference to borders, networks, connections, mobility, migration, innovations, and so on. But why do I not find any reference in these conference titles to the one thing that – especially since Occupy and the climate change protests – I hear and read more and more about, on my alternative news-sites, my favourite social media and YouTube channels, namely that thing called capitalism. That seems strange. Are African countries from Nigeria, Uganda, and Kenya to Angola and South Africa not affected by capitalism and its economy, politics and culture, or not part and parcel of global capitalism just like us, are these societies not also capitalist? Is capitalism not a significant issue in Africa too? Something that, as I see it here in Berlin, affects everyone’s life in one way or another? Why does capitalism not make it into the titles of these big conferences organised by all these academics studying Africa? Why? Why? I am so puzzled…’

This small, made-up scenario is intended to help me to get to a crucial point: the significant shortage at the heart (and top) of the African Studies community in Western Europe, and arguably across the entire Global North, of an explicit, focused, sustained, large-scale collective exploration, about the many, multifaceted features of contemporary capitalism on the continent, and about the characteristics of African society as capitalist society.

This line of enquiry began about two years ago, when I expressed some of these observations concerning the under-utilisation of capitalism as an analytical category in African Studies.[1] I had organised a roundtable titled ‘African capitalist society’ at the ASAUK 2016 (see here), and started a blog series on roape.net titled Capitalism in Africa a few weeks later. The series has a number of invaluable contributions, and the texts reveal the high level of analytical insights that can be gained from engaging with and exploring head-on the issue of capitalism in Africa (CiA). The sporadic bit of feedback I receive concerning the series from some of those who write in it (or read it), suggests that that sort of series was indeed needed. But I wasn’t actually flooded with blogposts, nor did many of the well-known, senior scholars in African Studies volunteer yet to write for the series. But I am sure, and so is ROAPE, that the series will continue well into the 2020s.

So, why another blogpost from me on capitalism in Africa? Basically to make two points. The first is to return to the point raised by our hypothetical student in Berlin above and present some actual data concerning conference titles of major African Studies conference in the Global North. The second point is to make an argument in favour of one of the positions that is at the heart of the series on roape.net: that many African countries are by now capitalist societies and analytically need to be treated as such. In countries such as Uganda and Kenya, for example, and especially their major cities one can find plenty of social phenomena that are typical of contemporary capitalist society across the world, and that have plenty of similarities, whether they occur in the Global North – London, Berlin, Paris – or in Africa – Pretoria, Nairobi, Kampala: from the new trends and impacts of social media (Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, influencers, followers, twitter shit storm), dating apps (Tinder), marketing and advertisement, the entertainment industry (commercial TV, comedy; music; lotteries; TV shows: investment, property, jackpot, dating, big brother, cultural competitions, we-change-your-life-in-an-instant formats; international commercial sports events, especially European football, broadcast in bars, hotels and restaurants), urban transport (Uber, Taxify), shopping arcades, corporate sponsorship of social events and initiatives (education, health, culture, sports), books present/advertised about individual success, wealth, happiness, turn-around-your-life and thinking-like-the-successful, privatisations, commercialised education/health, public-private partnerships, the presence of powerful TNCs (in banking, food & beverages, business consulting, hospitality, security, etc.), gated communities, evictions, gig/night/24-7-moneyneversleeps economy, jobless growth, precarity, under-/unemployment, poverty wages, inequality, luxury, opulence, 4×4, VIPs and celebrities, sugar daddies, betting, loan offers (via TV, radio, newspapers, billboards), personal indebtedness, mental illnesses, protesters vs. riot police battles, etc. In short, to the question can some African countries be regarded as capitalist countries from the point of view of observable social phenomena in everyday life, in the big cities, then the answer I would give is an emphatic yes, of course; what else do you think this all is, pre-capitalist, feudal?

But I will get to this second point later in this blog. First, I would like to share with you two incidences from earlier this year that inspired this particular intervention in our roape.net series.

The First Incidence: In April this year, I attended the Mwalimu Nyerere Intellectual Festival at the University of Dar es Salaam. The festival theme was the following: ‘The Second Scramble for Africa: The Quest for Socio-Economic Liberation of the Majority Poor’. Although not using the C-word directly, the use of the term ‘scramble’ is a very direct reference to the topic of imperialism on the continent, and therefore to a major general phenomenon in capitalist political economy. The political difference between this gathering’s title and the typical titles of European conferences that I have encountered over the years (headlined with words such as mobility, connections, flows, engagement, creativity, transformation, etc.) was striking. Why have I not come across a major African Studies conferences in Europe that carried the astute, urgent and straightforward title of the Nyerere Festival?

Perhaps, there were actually workshops, symposiums and conferences in Europe too with capitalism at the centre of the discussion but I wasn’t aware of them? So, a few days after the conference I checked quickly the past European Conferences on African Studies (ECAS) conference titles, and guess what? Nothing. Not a single reference to capitalism or imperialism. However, I realised I needed to get more data to see if ECAS was the norm or an outlier, in other words I wanted to know if my argument would hold against a larger sample. So I asked my long-term research collaborator, Nataliya Mykhalchenko, to extend the search, include other major Northern conferences, and check it all for approximately the last decade.

This sort of ad-hoc, rough, time-pressed analysis of the conference titles of some of the major African Studies gatherings in the Global North gives clear – yet what some might all ‘anecdotal’ – evidence of a very peculiar relationship of the discipline with Capitalism-as-social phenomenon and Capitalism-as-analytical-frame. At the minimum, the overview of conference titles shows that the term has hardly ever made it into any main- or sub-title of an African Studies conference for years (and years). I will get to what this means in a minute but first the ‘stats’.

So, we have compiled the conference titles for the following: European conferences on African studies (ECAS, 2005-19; 8 entries), African Studies Association Germany (VAD, 2008-18, 6), Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS, 2009-2018, 10), African Studies Association (ASA, United States of America) (called annual meetings; 2008-18, 11), African Studies in Italy (ASAI, 2010-18, 4 entries with titles). Out of 39 entries then, exactly 1 entry (or 2.56%) had capitalism in the conference title. If we include in the sample other regular major African studies gatherings in Western Europe – the Nordic Africa Day (2007-18, 8 entries), and the gatherings organised by the Netherlands Association for Africa Studies (NVAS; lately called NVAS Africa Day) (2006-18, 13 entries) – the ratio goes up to 1/60 (1.67%). So, ECAS was not an outlier after all, quite the opposite.[2]

What does this data indicate? I don’t want to speculate about the cognitive or political dimensions of the process of title setting here. But everybody who has ever been part of a conference (or workshop) knows that titles – as well as conference blurbs, programmes, catalogue of abstracts etc. – are regularly products of a longer collective process of deliberation, laying out and weighing the options, drafting, editing etc. So, it is evident that ‘capitalism’ as a conference theme has not won the day very often, and this must be weighed against a background of a widening public debate across several countries in the North on capitalism-as-point-of-discussion. Yet, capitalism has not been deemed suitable to headline these large important, days-long scholarly gatherings across Europe (and North America) that actually, in one way or another, shape the intellectual framing and priorities of a significant share of the hundreds of attending scholars, students and researchers and related publications down the line.

Of course, some might argue that conference titles are very general and surely conferences that have transformations, inequality, and so on in the title are discussing capitalism and/or its current variant neoliberalism. Still, there is a difference here between a theme being implied or explicit, in the blub or in the title. So again, we can ask the question, why did capitalism-as-a-scholarly-theme lose out, while other themes carried the day and were crowned with a conference title?

I could easily end the blog with this question, but let’s carry on a bit.

First, there are of course occasionally panels and even streams in these very big African Studies conferences that directly refer to ‘capitalism’ in the title and of course, there are workshops or other scholarly gatherings in the North that are dedicated in one way or another to the analysis of capitalism in Africa. In addition, of course, there are plenty of African Studies conference panels that neither have capitalism in their title nor blurb, but discuss some of the many issues on the continent that are shaped by capitalism, whether explicitly acknowledged and analysed by paper presenters or not: think of panels, papers and workshops on extraction, poverty, hunger, conflict, inequality, tradition, migration, and so on. And, of course, articles get published – in ROAPE and a few other journals – that deal with capitalism more or less head-on and extensively. But this is not the point.

What I am talking here about is the place of the capitalism-theme in the overall analytical landscape of the discipline. The titles of major conference are important; they play a special role in shaping political and intellectual debate. They signal intellectual relevance and urgency and are set-up against alternative themes. They indicate the play of forces concerning (i) analytical and thus also political priorities (and frames), and therefore (ii) set the agenda for the discipline as a whole. There is a difference, one would expect, between keynote speeches about, say, Capitalist Africa-Capitalist Africans vs. Urban Africa-Urban Africans (the theme of ECAS 2017).[3]

So again, at this point I can conclude: there is a long-standing pattern here of those who have the power to set major-conference agendas in the North – via selecting particular titles and keynote speaker, and, consciously or not, de-selecting other possibilities – to not choose ‘capitalism’ as a conference title. In other words, conference organisers across the North have for years, possibly decades pursued other framings for major conferences and appear for unknown reasons uninterested, reluctant, or whatever in capitalism as a core frame of conference discussion. There seems something particular then about the way African Studies engages with capitalism, as a social phenomenon, theme and concept.[4]

Still unconvinced? Go to the conference theme text of ECAS 2019. The conference title is ‘Africa: Connections and Disruptions’. While many past and present analysts of the global economy and society regard capitalism – i.e., ‘the system’, ‘the machine’, this particular form of social order – to be the mother of disrupters, does capitalism get a mention in the conference blurb? Is it not a fairly established analytical insight of the social sciences that capitalism brings relentless change, often very radical, turbulent, disruptive and tragic? Isn’t Africa a major example of this core global feature of capitalism? And yet, the theme blurb of 714 words makes no reference to capitalism as a force of change and, surely, this cannot be an issue of limited space. Yet the blurb refers to amongst other things, North-South interventions, finance, financialisation, financial inclusion, global economy, global value chains, transaction, consumer markets, economic and debt relations, etc. but not a word on capitalism, imperialism, class, TNC/corporation/firm.

I used the search engine repeatedly to make sure I had captured ‘the data’ correctly but there were ‘no matches’. Why is capitalism not mentioned even though reference to it could have been made easily and appropriately? To press the point: Why does capitalism in Africa not get a bullet point of its own? Maybe, I am splitting hairs, yet, equally perhaps this blurb is an excellent exemplar of my overall point, with all my disclaimers.

Before I move on, I want to share with you one final bit of data we assembled. Conference titles are one thing, but what about African Studies journals? Does capitalism get some significant analytical attention in the published work? To start with: How about the top-ranked journal: African Affairs? Let’s find out.[5] This is how my collaborator Nataliya summed up her research and analysis: Through some basic word searching I counted how many research articles had a term (at least) once in either title or abstract in the last five years (2013 – 2017). I focused on words ‘capitalism’, ‘capital’, ‘neo-liberal/neoliberalism’, ‘class’ and ‘market’. In the leading African Studies journal African Affairs the word ‘capitalism’ appears in two articles in this period: one by Alex Beresford in 2015 and the other one by Anne Pitcher in 2017. This totals to about 1.77% out of all the studied articles (total of 113). The related concept of ‘capital’ appears in four articles, so does the word ‘class’. ‘Neoliberalism/neo-liberal/neo-liberalisation’ has seven articles and the word ‘market’ six. The Journal of Modern African Studies contains two articles that mention ‘capitalism’ (one of which is ‘green capitalism’); two with ‘capital’; five with ‘class’; one with ‘neo-liberal’; and seven with ‘market’ (total of 119 articles). The Review of African Political Economy has nine articles with ‘capitalism’ (plus one with ‘philanthrocapitalism’); nineteen with ‘capital’; seventeen with ‘class’; fifteen with ‘neoliberal/neoliberalism’; sixteen with ‘market’ (total of 166 articles). The Journal of Southern African Studies has three articles with ‘capitalism’; ten articles with word ‘capital’; ten with ‘class’; eight with ‘neo-liberalism’; and twenty with ‘market’ (total of 305 articles). So, to pick out just one figure for the purpose of analytical narrative: the rate of capitalism for African Affairs speaks to the earlier finding coming out of the conference analysis, capitalism – as a phenomenon, theme, or concept – is peripheral, at least in the vital title and abstract section. Which term then is the top-term in this top-journal? Today, we have no time for that important question.

Instead, let’s move on then to my second incidence that puzzled me, and sparked further realisations: a few weeks after the Nyerere Intellectual festival, and our ROAPE connections workshop at the University of Dar es Salaam (that was the major purpose of my trip to Tanzania), I was in Hungary, at the 5th Pécs African Studies Conference. On the final conference day there was a panel titled ‘Visegrad Political Scientific Symposium on Africa Policies and African Studies’, with top representatives of Eastern European governments speaking about their respective governments’ engagement with Africa. One of the expert public servants had one or two slides titled something like ‘Future challenges for Africa’. There was a substantial number of issues listed: population growth, and so on. What didn’t feature, you’ve guessed it, was the dreaded C-word.

In the Q&A session, I asked the presenter and the speakers’ group in general something along these lines: Isn’t capitalism also a challenge for Africa given the evidence we have globally about the problems that come with it – many of which are reflected in intensive and ongoing global debate: environmental unsustainability, economic inequality, poverty, criminality, violence and so on? Shouldn’t capitalism feature when you think about the future Africa, say the Africa of 2040, 20 years of ever more capitalist restructuring, i.e. ever more capitalism? Would that not warrant some reference to capitalism in your presentation? But the response from one presenter was: we don’t think about capitalism as such; rather we take it as a given; after all this is the new world we live in; we promote our interests; do what is good for business …

This conference incident might indicate a broader issue: that government/state officials from the North who are engaging with Africa, ignore capitalism (at least in their public presentations, debate entries etc.) as a core empirical and analytical theme. In other words, these officials – from Budapest and Warsaw to Berlin, Brussels and Paris – would, it seems, typically not use capitalism (or anything very closely related to it) as part of their Africa’s-future-challenges presentation. And this position in all likelihood does not get challenged too much by the respective academic audiences, if the incidence I recount here indicates a wider phenomenon.[6]

There was a fairly similar phenomenon at a well-attended roundtable discussion on German Africa policy (‘Die deutsche Afrikapolitik’) at the German Africa Studies Association (VAD) biannual conference a few weeks later in Leipzig. Again, panel speakers – that included a think-tank expert and two Professors – did not really frame their take about present and future issues in Africa and Germany’s respective policy stand in any way that would suggest capitalism is an issue, i.e. that it is capitalist social order including its political economy and culture that generates changes, tensions and challenges that need to be identified, analysed and understood. In other words, that a major issue we are facing in the future is the struggle regarding what sort of capitalism operates in Africa in the decades to come.

But the responses I got to my question that was similar to the one I asked in Pécs – Does capitalism feature anywhere in your analysis (about current/future trends on the continent and related policy issues) and if not, why not? – was again revealing. My reading of the answers: a direct, explicit, deep, informed, serious, committed analytical engagement with capitalism is more or less off the analytical (and political) radar, for various reasons. As a consequence, also off the radar are matters of class power, interests and conflict, crony capitalism, criminal capital, etc. and thus some of the major c-induced political-economic and cultural trends and changes, i.e. much of what drives and troubles the new African capitalist societies in operation.

Later in the same conference I gave a talk as well, about ‘Post-Neoliberal Africa? On the Usefulness and Limits of the Neoliberalism Concept’. It was part of a very well-attended Saturday morning panel named, ‘What Is Africa a Case of? Connecting General Theory and Local Contexts’, one of the two panel organisers was Macamo Elisio who wrote one of the early blogposts in our series. In my presentation, I made the two arguments that inform the arguments in this blog: European African Studies – if conference titles can be considered ‘evidence’ of sort – does not give capitalism the analytical attention it deserves, i.e. the major, dominant discussions too often more or less ignore or put-at-fringes any debate or discussion on capitalism. Many people in the audience visibly agreed with that point, found the argument plausible. Positively received as well was the second point I made: that a number of social phenomena in several African countries – Uganda, Kenya, and so on – can be seen to be typical of a capitalist society, and thus are comparable to similar phenomena in other capitalist countries, across the world, including the North.

More specifically, while so much of the analysis we see is framed around matters of development, security, poverty, democracy, ethnicity, policy, agency and so on, a considerable amount of these writings, does not acknowledge or make much of the fact that the phenomenon occurs in a capitalist context, which is both global and local.

So, take for instance the debate about democracy in Africa (DiA): should that scholarship not also be about the characteristics of democracy in the context of a capitalist state, and within the context of capitalist global and national political economy? And yet, have you commonly (or ever) seen DiA studies framing some of the issue in this way, and mobilising related texts (Chomsky, Wright Mills etc.)? Have you witnessed the DiA panels and streams at ECAS, ASAUK or VAD conferences engage head-on and extensively with the topic of capitalism, and democracy within the context of capitalism? I have not. At the ASAUK 2014, in the Q&A part of a panel, I asked a DiA presenter something like: ‘The countries studied can be regarded as capitalist countries, i.e. capitalist polities. Do you consider this in your analysis (and if not, why not)?’ I don’t remember the exact answer, but it was certainly not a ‘Yes of course I do…’ type. Well, four years later, we could check whether capitalism occurs in any of the indices of the major democracy in Africa books published in the last decade. My best guess is: as a rule, capitalism is absent in almost all of the indices.

Let’s for a moment assume that DiA studies indeed does not engage with capitalism very much. That would raise questions such as: Why? And, what are the analytical and political implications of this state of affairs, for the DiA scholarship and debate, and beyond? Do DiA analysts not regard some of the African countries they study as capitalist societies, hence, capitalist democracies and capitalist polities (with capitalist governments, class relations, and respective power and conflict phenomena etc.)? Perhaps some of the DiA scholars can explain to us themselves what they make of C-D-A.

Finally, let me repeat my analytical proposition. Many social phenomena in a range of African countries can be regarded as the processes of a capitalist society, and that this has implications for the debate about and study of (capitalism in) Africa. But, I realise, I have said more than enough for one blog. Let me leave a more extensive elaboration of this final issue for another day. I think I have the title for that blog already: Good morning, Capitalist Africa.[7]

I end with two closing thoughts. First, one day, I am sure, an ECAS conference will have capitalism in the title, it is, as they say, (almost) inevitable. Second, writing this from Kampala (following a stay in Nairobi), my final-final one for today: if indeed capitalism is in town, then the status quo, the business as usual in African studies concerning capitalism in Africa is, in analytical terms, with every passing day ever more inadequate, for capturing this fast-moving empirical reality. Much of what goes on regarding capitalism in countries like Uganda remains unstudied. Both concluding thoughts are based on witnessing the expansion and intensification of capitalism in the cities and beyond. As the history and science of capitalism tells us it is a system that constantly expands and permeates, throughout the globe. Welcome to Capitalist Africa, then! And, African Studies, let’s talk…

I would like to thank Nataliya Mykhalchenko for her excellent and tireless work on this blog (researching and putting together the conference and journal stats), Alex Beresford, Tom Goodfellow and Tijo Salverda for their comments on earlier version of this draft, and Leo Zeilig for his encouragement to put all this on paper, after I told him about the reaction to my arguments at the VAD conference in Leipzig.

Jörg Wiegratz is a Lecturer in the Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and a member of the editorial board of RoAPE. His recent books include Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (co-edited with Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco, Zed, forthcoming 2018), and Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud (co-edited with David Whyte, 2016). His is a regular contributor and editor of roape.net.

Featured Photograph: Westlands in Nairobi is regarded as one of the city’s new business districts (29 June, 2012).

Notes

[1] Graham Harrison made a related point a while ago when he observed that scholars of development regularly do not acknowledge that what they study, namely actually capitalist development.

[2] The VAD 2016 Berlin had the title ‘Africa in a capitalist world’. Though note that for various reasons, this 2016 gathering was an unusual, shortened mini-VAD conference (‘Kurztagung’), with only one main conference day, instead of the usual three. However, my imaginary German student would be pleased to see VAD’s title choice, especially in comparison to some of the other titles such as ‘Africa Here; Africa There’ (CAAS, 2011)! Note, the bi-annual conference of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (ASAUK) has no title. FYI, we have also listed the titles for the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP, 2008-2018, 11 entries). Here, Australia seems to be major (if not dominant) actor in the Association. And Australia is regarded to be part of the Global North.

[3] There is a related question: how come there are (Marxist/critical) scholars researching capitalism in Africa within African Studies – and they organise panels/workshops, run a journal such as ROAPE etc, yet this is not reflected in the major conference titles?

[4] There is another Area Studies field that has, for historical reasons amongst others, a particular relationship with the capitalism concept as well: Eastern European (EE) studies. According to EE scholar Nicolette Makovicky, the academic debate about capitalism as such is on the fringes. Instead EE scholars investigate and speak of precarity, class, or financialization but rarely refer to the notion of capitalist society as such. Accordingly, in post-Communist Eastern Europe, the ideological delegimization of Left politics and the long-awaited arrival of ‘market democracy’ in the 1990s worked to mute public, political, and intellectual critiques of capitalism. As the consequences of the neoliberalization of Central and EE economies and societies became increasingly evident, the debate about capitalism surged a little, with academic discussions circling around matters of labour, finance etc., and politicians promising to lessen the blows of capitalism by policing foreign investors, excluding migrants, and restraining the power of the EU (private email exchange, October 2018).

[5] We wish to emphasize that all this is very preliminary, rough, time-pressed analysis for the purpose of making arguments in a blog. Counting errors might have occurred, and we take responsibility for that. That said, please note: (i) only research articles were included (not editorials, briefings, reviews); (ii) some of word combinations included: capital market, labour market, drug market, social capital, human capital, middle-class, working class and others (all of which were counted separately); (iii) ‘keywords/tags’ that are often included alongside articles were not included. Again, we wanted to get a short, preliminary insight into the data, a feel for it all, rather than an ultra-comprehensive data set and a conclusive analysis.

[6] In Uganda, government officials (as well as journalists, columnists, donors, NGO staff etc.) hardly ever use capitalism in their analysis. I was told during visits in Kenya, that capitalism is also hardly used in debates there (by analysts, politicians etc.). This might indicate a broader issue (though for partly different causes); somewhat comparable to the low use of capitalism in analyses about Africa by officials in Europe.

[7] I should finally add that I do not wish to insult or dismiss anyone personally or disrespect any form of scholarship in African Studies, but merely make some analytical points and raise some questions based on some personal observations. This is done in the name of understanding, critiquing and, hopefully, advancing the state of debates in African Studies and related disciplines that study African issues (international development etc.) on a few points of analysis.

Moral Dimensions of Economic Life in Africa

ROAPE

October 17, 2018

International Research Workshop: The Moral Dimensions of Economic Life in Africa

Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne (November 8-9, 2018)

co-funded by: Thyssen Foundation (Germany), University of Cologne (Global South Study Centre), and University of Leeds (POLIS).

For decades, mainstream economic analysis has tended to exclude morality from the investigation and understanding of economic life. Yet in reality there are always various moral dimensions at play when it comes to people’s economic thinking, practices and relationships, on one hand, and the structures in which they operate, on the other.

In this workshop – organised by Tijo Salverda (Cologne), Cristiano Lanzano (Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala), and Jörg Wiegratz (Leeds) – we will look more closely at this morality-economy nexus, with a particular focus on Africa. Due to their economic and socio-cultural diversity and complexity, African countries are privileged sites to discuss the moral dimensions of economic life. Many economies on the continent are characterised by substantial interventions by donors and other foreign actors, a powerful presence of multinationals, rapid and turbulent change, a range of difficulties in achieving structural transformation, and, finally, GDP growth alongside rising inequalities across classes and locations. Related public debates are flourishing; for example, about the impact of global connections and new technologies, climate change, the rise of a new middle class, foreign economic dominance, the reality and prospect of sovereignty, or the distinctiveness and future of ‘Africapitalism’. Against this intriguing background, our group of 20 researchers from across the globe will gather to discuss one of the most topical issue of our time: the state of morality in today’s world, all with a focus on Africa. This workshop is the second one on the theme, following on from a successful event in Uppsala in June this year (co-sponsored by the Nordic Africa Institute and the Review of African Political Economy).

A further workshop on the moral dimensions of economic life with a regional focus on Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia will take place on 20-22 March, 2019 at St Antony’s College, Oxford (sponsored by POLIS, Leeds and Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre, Oxford). This workshop – organised by Nicolette Makovicky (Oxford), Dimitra Kofti (Athens) and Jörg Wiegratz (Leeds) – will culminate with a day for cross-regional debate of the morality-economy nexus in global capitalism, bringing together scholars across conventional Area Studies divides.

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