Keeper of the Truth: Claude Lanzmann and Frantz Fanon

August 9, 2018

By Heike Becker

Claude Lanzmann who died in Paris on 5 July this year at the age of 92 will forever be remembered for ‘Shoah’, his extraordinary 1985 nine-and-a-half-hour epic documentary that changed the world’s understanding of the Holocaust. The Shoah films compelled through touching, often shocking individual testimony, the result of eleven years of research and filming.

Less well-known than the French filmmaker’s engagement with the European holocaust experience and his controversial support of Israel, is his fierce anti-colonialist activism against France’s colonial war in Algeria and his close encounter with Frantz Fanon. Lanzmann, at the time a radical journalist and writer became significant during Fanon’s last year of life as an intermediary between the latter and his publisher and supporters in France. Notably Lanzmann organised a meeting in Rome in July 1961 between Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which resulted in Sartre’s famous preface to the The Wretched of the Earth, the manuscript of which Fanon had brought along to give to Sartre. The physically and emotionally exhausting three days of intensive conversation were the first time Fanon met the French philosopher and activist, arguably his most profound intellectual influence. Lanzmann however had already had some months earlier an intriguing meeting with Fanon in his Tunis exile.

In 1952 Lanzmann had become – at Sartre’s invitation – a contributor to the radical French publication Les Temps Modernes after his return from Germany where he had taught Philosophy at the newly-founded Free University of Berlin in 1949 and from where he had reported as a journalist. He was among those on the French left who took an ardent anti-colonialist stand against France’s colonial war in Algeria. In the autumn of 1960 Lanzmann signed the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ that supported the independence struggle, denounced the torture practices by the colonial forces and endorsed resistance to military conscription into the French army. He also testified for the defence in the Paris trial against the more practical-radical supporters of the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) known as the porteurs de valises for the suitcases they carried full of money and ammunition for the FLN.

Soon afterwards Lanzmann travelled to Tunis, where the headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, the newspaper El Moudjahid, and the diplomatic and propaganda sections of the FLN were based. The French writer-activist was impressed by those he met there; he admired their cheerful optimism and conviction that they had won the war and Algerian independence was within close reach. ‘But,’ Lanzmann recounted decades later in his remarkable memoir The Patagonian Hare, ‘the encounter that really shook me, captivated me and that was to have a profound effect on my own life was my meeting with Frantz Fanon.’ Fanon was ill already with the leukaemia that would eventually kill him a year later and lying on a mattress on the floor of the apartment where he lived with his wife Josie and young son. Fanon spoke intensely. Lanzmann recalled:

I sat on the floor next to the mattress where Fanon lay and listened to him talk about the Algerian revolution for hours, stopping several times when the pain became unbearable. I put my hand on his forehead, which was bathed in sweat, and awkwardly tried to dry it, or I held his shoulder gently as though by mere touch I might ease his pain. But all the while Fanon spoke with a lyricism I had never before encountered … as he propped himself up on his elbow and announced like a visionary that Africa, the Africa of his dreams would not experience the Middle Ages as Europe had, one could not but be carried along by his words, could only subscribe to his glorious utopian ideal.

Even after his return to Paris weeks later, Lanzmann was ‘still completely carried away by this man whom I believed to be the keeper of the truth, and of the truth as a secret.’ In the meantime, Lanzmann had met several more times with Fanon, who was feeling better due to a brief remission of the cancer. They spoke about Fanon’s relationship with the FLN, and about Sartre and his book Critique de la raison dialectique, which had recently been published. With characteristic immense passion Fanon claimed that the fighters of the ALN (National Liberation Army) had actually read and engaged with Sartre’s critical discussion of revolutionary experience and impasse. Fanon organised a trip for Lanzmann to go and visit what he called the fighters in ‘the interior’, whom he had painted in glowing colours to his French guest.

For Lanzmann, the first Frenchman to visit the area, the two-week trip to Ghardimaou on the border between Tunisia and Algeria was both enlightening and sobering. He realised that neither were these the true fighters of ‘the interior’, a guerrilla force operating inside the French colony, nor were they the famed peasant-warrior-philosophers of Fanon’s passionate portrayal. Instead, Lanzmann found the Armée des frontièrs, Algerian combatants and their leadership who had long ago crossed into the border zone; he also realised that their engagement with Sartre’s writing was limited to a seminar Fanon had given them on his recent visit to the border, his last political action and trip before the illness took full hold of him.

None the less the French writer-activist was captivated by the men who had started out fighting in the Wilayah guerrilla zones in the Algerian interior, and planned to write about the trip on his return to Paris. This however was not to be. Shortly after having arrived back he had encounters with members of different factions of the Algerian liberation forces, and realised their bitter and violent differences. So, he kept the story to himself and did not write anything, Lanzmann began to see that the Algerians were victims of racist violence in their colonised homeland as much as in France, whom the small number of solidarity activists on the French left had unsurprisingly idealized.

Lanzmann attended the celebrations of Algerian independence on 5 July 1962 along with ‘the whole of revolutionary Africa’, as he remembered. But then, just a few weeks later, the country’s first President, Ben Bella in one of his first speeches as head of state announced that the Algerian Republic was planning to send 100,000 troops to help liberate Palestine. His response, in Lanzmann’s own words, again in his memoir, perhaps best shows his deep-seated ambivalences, even ambiguities: ‘For me, it was over! I had thought that it was possible to believe both in an independent Algeria and the state of Israel. I was wrong.’

Despite his continued admiration for Fanon as a passionate philosopher-revolutionary and a warm and delicate person, Lanzmann’s impassioned anti-colonialism suffered severe disillusionment. Postcolonial Africa to him, as for many others, was a great disappointment. This was not the Africa of Fanon’s dreams, he declared in the Patagonian Hare, failing perhaps, to fully appreciate the critical power and insights of Fanon’s masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, which Lanzmann had helped to deliver.

Notwithstanding, Lanzmann’s conviction and vital role in the last phase of the Algerian independence war and his passionate anti-colonialism was ‘existential, almost physical’; it was grounded in deep empathy with those seeking to create a new life. And so was his Zionism, as Enzo Traverso writes in his critical appraisal of the great film maker and intellectual activist. Lanzmann’s expressed Zionist conviction – confounding as it has been to many on the left – perhaps should also be best understood as profound empathy with ‘a community of settlers and soldiers who had fled persecution and were ready to rebuild a new life after the Holocaust.’

In that sense perhaps, a critical-sympathetic appraisal of one of the last great activist intellectuals of the French post-war left may help understand that what was perplexing about his life-long lived commitment, onwards from the eighteen-year old who joined the communist Résistance in occupied France.

On the occasion of Lanzmann’s 90^th birthday in November 2015, the Free University Berlin had invited him back to the place of his first job. During a two-day colloquium on his life and work he spoke eloquently and passionately about his experiences in Berlin just after World War 2. Characteristic were his comments on working with German students in the immediate post-war era, who were his contemporaries; the young men of course mostly former soldiers in the Wehrmacht (the German army from 1935-1945). Almost sixty years later Lanzmann still displayed considerable empathy with these young Germans despite the fresh unbearable pain he must have felt, having learnt just recently of the full extent of the Nazi atrocities. Interestingly too that Lanzmann left Berlin after a brief spell of teaching when the Alliance Française that paid his salary wouldn’t allow him to teach a course on antisemitism, which – he insisted during the 2015 entretien – had been specifically requested by his German students. It appears that the French authorities thought this might be too volatile. Sitting in the audience that evening I could not help thinking: What a great man, in all his complexity!

Heike Becker is a regular contributor to roape.net, she is an activist and writer. As a professor at the University of the Western Cape she teaches anthropology and writes on politics, culture, and social movements across the continent.

Featured Photograph: Banner outside the Minneapolis Police Department following the shooting of Jamar Clark on November 15, 2015

Ethiopia’s Quiet Revolution: From Revolutionary Developmentalism to Neoliberal Reform

ROAPE

August 7, 2018

By Yohannes Woldemariam

On June 5 this year in Addis Ababa, Abiy Ahmed, the new Prime Minister and head of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), announced his plan for the privatization of key sectors of the economy and the unconditional implementation of the Ethiopia Eritrea Border Commission (EEBC) rulings with Eritrea after the war fought at the end of the last century. What spurred this dramatic departure from the long-standing and zealously guarded state developmentalist ideology of Revolutionary Democratic Developmentalism (RDD) and this sudden move to break the deadlock in Ethiopian-Eritrean relations, which have remained hostile since the 1998-2000 war between the two countries?

In short, the difficult history of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) dating back to the armed struggle days has been the real cause for the impasse of the last twenty years. The border conflict was a pretext. So, it has taken an Oromo Prime Minister like Abiy, combined with the economic burden of sustaining an army on a war footing and the decline of different factions within the TPLF/EPRDF to enable the breakthrough. For roape.net I look at the background to the quiet revolution taking place inside Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian Economy

Ethiopia finds itself in economic difficulty, deeply in debt and under pressure from creditors despite reported average growth rates between 8 and 11 per cent since 2000, in part resulting from foreign investment – including loans from the People’s Republic of China – in the country’s agricultural and manufacturing sectors. Under the TPLF/EPRDF, RDD meant misuse of river waters and the ‘leasing’ of indigenous land to foreign capitalists. For example, Gambela, a region on the border with South Sudan, is the region worst affected by land leasing and resettlement. It was here that the TPLF earmarked almost half of the region for commercial farms, and since 2008, foreign companies have leased a total of 225,012 hectares in the region.

Increases in imported global food and fuel prices, rapid expansion of the money supply, and a large devaluation of its currency (the birr) have led to high inflation in recent years. Large and persistent government deficits, and the absence of virtually any stabilizing fiscal and monetary policies, have accelerated a downward economic spiral. In addition, theft from state enterprises and participation in the informal market is widespread.

Late in 2017 head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, visited the country, no doubt concerned by the dire situation. Ethiopia is classified by the IMF as slipping from moderate to high-debt status. China has been propping up the TPLF/EPRDF with loans and economic aid and it is significant that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went to Ethiopia right before he was fired by Donald Trump and told the government about the pitfalls of Chinese ‘easy credit’ loans with their extremely high interest rates. The terms of Chinese loans are not transparent, so it is hard to cite exact figures but we do know that, as of 2009, China had surpassed the United States as a trading partner with African countries, with Ethiopia ranked sixth in importance.

Ethiopia has a population of about 106 million people, of whom 41 per cent is under the age of 15 and more than 28 per cent is aged between 15 and 29. Youth unemployment is estimated at nearly 27 percent. The challenge on the economic front is immense. One major concern must be the potential resistance to change from those within the TPLF with vested interests in the RDD.

There has long been skepticism at the reported double-digit growth that the government claimed to have achieved for over a decade. Economies like Ethiopia inflate their GDP figures by fudging and redefining categories, by manipulating price estimations, and by introducing statistical assumptions in their estimation of growth that are gross misrepresentations. GDP is thus not a reliable indicator of the condition of the country’s economy.

More revealing economic indicators are capital outflow and currency exchange rates. Abiy and the TPLF/EPRDF will have been advised by the IMF and the US to implement austerity measures, if they want to overcome their foreign exchange crisis. In 2009 alone, illicit money leaving the Ethiopian economy totaled US$3.26 billion (which was double the amount in each of the two previous years). This was combined with rising domestic interest rates and import cost inflation. According to a study by the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute, Ethiopia lost $25 billion to capital flight from 1970 to 2010.

The foreign exchange crisis is so serious that the United Arab Emirates prince Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, recently deposited US$1 billion in the National Bank of Ethiopia to bolster the country’s fiscal and monetary policy, as well as to enhance the Bank’s liquidity and foreign exchange reserves. He also provided US$2 billion to stimulate the Ethiopian economy and to encourage joint investment.

Convincing the prince to deposit this money is one of the tangible diplomatic achievements of Abiy, along with the release of Ethiopian political prisoners jailed in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Egypt. In return, it is reasonable to assume that the UAE is seeking Ethiopia’s diplomatic and political support in its rivalry with Qatar. Whatever direction these economic reforms take, it is clear that Ethiopia’s much lauded ‘revolutionary’ developmentalism has floundered (see Pádraig Carmody’s blogpost on roape.net).

The Border Conflict

In addition to his plans for the reform of the economy, Abiy has reiterated his intention to settle the border conflict with Eritrea by abandoning the previous rejectionist policies of the TPLF/EPRDF and, by ‘accepting the Algiers Agreement unconditionally’, to demarcate the border with Eritrea according to the EEBC decision. This has received a mixed reception, even though initially the TPLF/EPRDF accepted the ‘final and binding’ nature of the verdict from the EEBC.

When questioned in parliament as to why he had announced this change without consulting parliament, Abiy reminded members that they had decided 16 years before to accept the Algiers Agreement (a peace agreement signed in 2000 by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments in the Algerian capital). He said he has seen signed documents to that effect in his office. He argued there is nothing new in his statements reviving the physical demarcation and delimitation of the 1000-kilometer border between the two countries. The more reasonable question that he raised was why the decision hasn’t been implemented.

He also reminded his parliament that Ethiopia has unresolved border disputes not only with Eritrea but also with Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia – not to mention the on-going internal conflict over regional boundaries, such as Wolkite and the Ogaden border with Oromia. In an effort to demystify the ‘borders’, he gave examples of how artificial African borders really are. Recently he cited how the Oromo in Borenna in Ethiopia have more in common with the Oromo in Kenya than with the Oromo in Hararghe or Wollega in Ethiopia. Colonialism drew the borders of Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia, with no regard for the indigenous peoples and their territories, he argued.

Abiy urged Ethiopians to think beyond borders and look to economic integration and the benefits of coordination between different countries in creating economies of scale. He also urged reflection on the cost of the Ethiopian/Eritrean standoff and the suffering of both peoples, reminding them that the 1998-2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia was arguably ‘the worst inter-state war in Africa.’

Reactions and Responses

Initially, Abiy’s announcement on ‘the border question’ was met with a mixed reception both in Ethiopia and in Eritrea, and provoked intense debate. The announcement also created confusion in Ethiopia because within 24 hours another broadcast by the TPLF stipulated the need for ‘discussion’ regarding the border issue and chastised Abiy for announcing his proposals without consultation with ‘the people.’ This TPLF statement temporarily dampened the widespread euphoria, leaving close observers wondering if the TPLF was even in agreement with Abiy’s initiative. When it comes to the border issue, Eritreans have come to expect only obfuscation from the political class.

Eritrea responded to Abiy’s initiative on 20 June 2018, by proposing a delegation to Addis Ababa to meet him and to ‘gauge developments in Ethiopia.’ The delegation arrived in Addis Ababa five days later to a warm welcome. Abiy flew to Eritrea within two weeks to an unprecedented reception. President Isaias Afeworki of Eritrea is scheduled to visit Addis Ababa in return.

Many Eritreans welcomed the proposals, because the on-going conflict over the border has entrenched the militarization of the entire society and undermined the economic development of the country. Forced recruitment into the armed forces is a major cause of Eritrean migration abroad, for which the country is now regularly in the headlines of the international media. Hopes are building that the resolution of the border issue with agreed demarcation can bring an end to the indefinite military service in Eritrea.

The reduction of migration from Eritrea could be achieved by scrapping the mandatory indefinite military service that has been maintained by the government since the war with Ethiopia. The challenge for the Eritrean government then would be providing employment and rehabilitation into civilian life for the hundreds of thousands serving in the armed forces. Yet, the unintended consequences of opening up Eritrea could pose a threat to Isaias Afeworki’s tight control over the regime, possibly leading to political reform and the end of big man rule.

International and Regional Actors

There are speculations that the visit to Eritrea, Djibouti and Ethiopia in April by the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Donald Yamamoto, may have been part of an effort to break the long stalemate by nudging Ethiopia to accept the Algiers Agreement. The ‘guarantors’ of the Algiers Agreement were the United States, the European Union and the African Union. For sixteen years, dereliction of duty on the part of these so-called guarantors enabled Ethiopia to flout the agreement with impunity. Ethiopia waged a ‘no war no peace’ strategy intended to bring Eritrea to its knees.

Why might the US be changing its policy toward the Eritrean regime by actively seeking a resolution? One probable reason is the changing regional and geopolitical reality. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now actively working with the Eritrean president Isaias Afeworki in effect helping him break his isolation. The fear that a political vacuum may enable radical Islamist groups, like al-Shabab in Somalia, to gain a foothold in an unstable Eritrea or Ethiopia, is perhaps another reason.

The Trump administration may also have decided to break with the unconditional backing Ethiopia enjoyed from the Clinton and Obama administrations as part of their policy of isolating the Eritrean regime and maintaining security in the region. But this arrangement was always problematic, not least because al-Shabab had emerged as a result of US-backed Ethiopian intervention in Somalia in the first place.

Arguably, the Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations made things more difficult by interfering with the verdict of the EEBC. Former US Assistant Secretary of State, Jendayi Frazer, aided Condoleezza Rice in this regard, while President Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, waged a vendetta against the Eritrean president, thus reinforcing the impasse. Ironically the only US official who stood firmly behind the EEBC decision was the right-wing maverick John Bolton, who was US Permanent Representative to the UN and is currently National Security Advisor to Donald Trump. Settling the border conflict would mean a profound change in the geopolitics of the region.

In addition, the rich petrodollar countries of the Middle East are exploiting the conflicts in the Horn of Africa to increase their influence. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have established military bases in Assab (an Eritrean port) for their bombing campaigns in Yemen. The Saudi and UAE military presence in Eritrea is not particularly pleasant for Ethiopia. These countries may have leaned on Ethiopia and Eritrea to settle their dispute, hoping to secure their investments in a more stable Horn of Africa. In the context of Nile hydro politics, a growing alliance between Egypt and Eritrea is a threat to Ethiopia.

The rivalry of Saudi Arabia and the UAE with Qatar, Iran and Turkey is also being played out in the Horn of Africa. The UAE has established port facilities in Somaliland much to the chagrin of Somalia. Turkey is leasing land in Suakin in Sudan to establish a naval dock. Having good access to ports with road infrastructure already in place is also critical to Ethiopia. Abiy emphasized this in a speech he gave to parliament and admitted that he had travelled to Saudi Arabia to request space for Ethiopian cargo in Saudi ports. Eritrea could also benefit from Ethiopia’s use of its ports and perhaps even from the operations of Africa’s successful Ethiopian Airlines.

There is also the matter of Djibouti. Ethiopia is a landlocked country dependent for access on Djibouti’s ports for 95 per cent of its imports and exports. If a genuine settlement is achieved between Eritrea and Ethiopia, among the peace dividends for both countries would be the utilization of Eritrean ports for Ethiopian exports and imports, decreasing Ethiopia’s dependence on the costly Djibouti ports. Djibouti is a crowded place with foreign troops from the US, China, France, Japan, Italy and Saudi Arabia stationed in the tiny city-state.

Abiy’s Internal Challenges

Ethnic conflict in the south and southwest of the country, in the Moyale area, has deteriorated (after a brief hiatus) following the ascent of Abiy to the leadership. The Special Forces, in the service of TPLF generals involved in illicit activities in the Ogaden region in the Southeast, continue to be a menace. Amharas are being evicted and displaced from different parts of Oromia. So, there is still some danger that a faction of the TPLF which is regrouping in Tigray with its intelligence tentacles throughout Ethiopia may sabotage Abiy’s programme.

Anarchy, crime and vigilante ethnic killings are increasing, which suggests that things could spiral out of control. Millions are internally displaced and desperate. The TPLF authority at the federal level is seriously damaged, but it can still play a spoiler role in the Somali region – where the Chinese have begun to extract oil in the area contiguous to Oromia – by backing the notorious human rights violator, Abdi Mohamud Omar (known as Abdi Illey).

Abiy is pushing for an ‘all-Ethiopian nationalism’ pledging that the government of Ethiopia will cease to be the prerogative of a minority and will in future represent and embrace all Ethiopians. The allure of his message is steeped in the language of reconciliation and love. In building his support base, he has cobbled together a motley group of allies, some with contradictory visions. How he will manage these competing interests remains to be seen.

Another of his challenges will be to convince foreign investors that Ethiopia remains ‘open for business’, in the face of the continuing ethnic violence. Some foreign owned businesses have been torched by protesters. So, for example, Deep Kamra, country manager of the Dangote Cement factory, owned by Africa’s richest man, was recently murdered by unidentified assailants along with his secretary and driver. The extensive publicity given to the violence and the state of emergency has made it harder for Abiy to make the country seem attractive to investors – a key element in any neoliberal project.

Where now?

A big question remains whether Abiy can be the agent or midwife for transformative change, for genuine democracy in Ethiopia and whether his ‘quiet revolution’ can break the power of ruling cliques and their power bases in the country. Although he has promised term limits, Abiy himself is a contradiction, as a selected and not an elected leader. What many argue is urgently needed is a transitional government leading to constitutional rule and elections. Yet, he also urgently needs to tackle corruption. What will he do to try to retrieve the money stolen by corrupt officials which is estimated at over thirty billion dollars from US aid alone?

It remains unclear if Abiy can overcome the obstacles he is facing and consolidate the forces of integration, reconciliation and national unity that he claims to promote. His achievements in the first months of his leadership have been surprising by any measure but can there really be a shift from personal rule to deep structural transformation and sustainable democratic institutions that Ethiopia’s poor desperately need and deserve?

Yohannes Woldemariam is a political economist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe, Costa Rica, Africa and the United States. Currently, he is a visiting professor at the National University in Costa Rica and working on a book comparing and contrasting the Costa Rican and Eritrean experiences. He can be emailed at ywoldem@gmu.edu

Featured Photograph: President Isaias Afewerki and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sign the Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship between Eritrea and Ethiopia on 9 July 2018.

Global Corporate Capitalism and the State

ROAPE

August 3, 2018

From the editorial for no. 156 of ROAPE, Peter Lawrence discusses an issue that deals with the state and its function within the economy. ROAPE has since its inception engaged with issues relating to the nature and role of the State in Africa. In 1976, ROAPE focused on the class character of the state, debating which factions of the petty bourgeoisie, or the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, or a ‘political class’ dominated it. While the Debates section of this issue is devoted to the ROAPE/Third World Network workshop on radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa held in Accra last November. This is the first of a series of three workshops which ROAPE has sponsored across the continent in cooperation with local organisations. Readers can access these debates for free from our website by registering and logging in here.

By Peter Lawrence

The articles in this issue are in one way or the other concerned with the state and its function within the economy. ROAPE has since its inception engaged with issues relating to the nature and role of the State in Africa. ROAPE no. 5, published in 1976, focused on the class character of the state, debating which factions of the petty bourgeoisie, or the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, or a ‘political class’ dominated it. The state itself was variously labelled by the contributors to that issue as ‘relatively autonomous’, ‘overdeveloped’, ‘unsteady’ or in the case of Amin’s Uganda, ‘unhinged’. In the Global North, the state was not regarded as Marx and Engels’s executive committee of the bourgeoisie, but rather as relatively independent of class forces, acting as a referee between capital and labour and ensuring some degree of fair distribution of income and effective provision of health, social welfare and education services. This view fitted well with the idea of a capitalism declining under the weight of its own contradictions and socialism being on the agenda for the near future. In Africa, as in most of the Global South, the state, was seen as the necessary principal actor in mobilising resources for investment for development.

However, over the period in which neoliberalism became the dominant ideology buttressing capital’s political fight back against labour’s increasing share of value and the ensuing falling rate of profit, especially from manufacturing, the order of the day has been to force the state to retreat. Financial liberalization, the privatization of state assets, the subcontracting of public functions to private enterprises, curbs on public expenditure, and laws curtailing the rights of trades unions were the building blocks of a process that saw capital recapture a greater share of value. These policies were not only pursued by governments but also became the key parts of the policy instructions to countries of the Global South seeking help from the international financial institutions, along with other ‘liberalisation’ measures concerned with exchange rates, capital flows and trade. Yet these recommendations flew in the face of the history of the very successful East Asian economies, especially South Korea, examples of a ‘developmental state’ in which investment was directed by a technocratic elite to specific productive activities as part of a manufacturing industrial and rural development growth strategy involving parallel state investment in education, skills and social welfare.

The state under neoliberal capitalism has been undergoing a process of what can best be called colonisation by capital such that the interests of the dominant global capital, both financial and industrial, were effectively aligned with those of the state. Now commonly known as ‘state capture’, this alignment has been enabled by the ‘revolving door’ in which political figures move into business and back into politics and vice versa, by business lobbying, by business funding of political parties at election time, and, as a consequence of privatisations and sub-contracting of public services, by an increasingly systemic relationship between capital and the state. There have always been close relations between powerful business lobbies and governments, but nowhere near as blatant and corrupt as they have become.

Today, the neoliberal project is under attack as never before, especially in the Global South as its failure to achieve real structural change becomes increasingly evident. Even in the global North, it is clear that especially since the 2007-8 financial crash, there has been a failure to deal with the causes of that crisis and a new one is predicted to be imminent. For the countries of the African continent, the ‘developmental State’ is looking an attractive label to adopt, even if the policies that are being pursued by those countries that adopt it, with the possible exception of Ethiopia, do not encompass the range and intensity of execution that characterised East Asian developmental states.

The research articles in this issue relate to many of these themes, and especially in the case of the first three, to the ways in which global corporate power manipulates the state in its own interest, supplanting previously national capitalist class influence over government policy. In Malawi, Julia Smith and Kelley Lee show how the colonial and post-colonial states have pursued policies that have been in the interests of the tobacco industry. In the colonial period, policy detrimental to the growing number of smallholder growers was determined in favour of estate owners and tobacco companies. With independence, as some of the estates passed to political allies of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, policy reinforced their new economic power once again to the disadvantage of the small holders, both in terms of the price they received and the quality of leaf they were permitted to grow. The increasing domination of the global industry by a few tobacco corporates then led to the state supported growth of contract farming, once again ensuring that the estate producers and the global corporates took a larger share of value. They also gained sufficient power to prevent the state from challenging them by changing policies in favour of smallholders. The authors point to another aspect of state capture which emphasises the importance to the Malawian economy of tobacco cultivation even though Malawians receive little of the value, with the corporates blaming the anti-smoking lobby for falling demand and lower prices.

‘State capture’ is a phrase which in South Africa came to be associated with the relationship between the Gupta family and their business activities and the then President, Jacob Zuma. Less attention has been given to other global and local interests that have been given favourable status in that country and which can also be seen as ‘state capture.’ David Masondo documents the way in which the South African motor industry has been subsidised by what he terms the ‘business nanny state’ as opposed to the ‘developmental state’ under which banner this policy sometimes has appeared. Unlike a development state which directs investment, in partnership with enterprises and with the agreement of the capitalist class, to specific areas of the economy in order to, for example, maximise upsteam and downstream linkages, the state in this case can only impact on the levels of production and exports. Masondo argues that what the Motor Industry Development Programme has done is to reinforce the business strategy of the global motor corporations that control the industry, a strategy which ensures their profits by lowering production costs through state incentives, subsidies and lowering of tariffs so that more production is located in the country. Whereas in the case of South Korea, for example, vehicles were produced under licence to begin with, but the developmental state ensured that these domestic producers could acquire and develop the technology not only to produce the whole car, rather than assemble imported parts, but develop automobile technology further so as to produce new locally designed models, thus keeping more of the value within the economy. Masondo shows that the original domestic automobile industry operating under licences from foreign corporates did not follow the South Korean path but was allowed to be subsumed into the strategies of the dominant global firms whose continued presence in the country was assured through state financial support.

The consequence of neoliberal market ‘freedoms’ is that global corporations, like those controlling the South African motor industry, are able to move capital around the world wherever it can generate the highest returns, with the supplicant governments offering financial incentives to compensate for higher start-up or operating costs. Hence there has been a call, especially from progressive quarters, for instituting capital controls. Ilias Alami examines the history of capital controls and in particular their class character in reproducing capitalist social relations. He argues that it is important to discover the class dynamics behind capital controls especially given the calls from trades unions and progressive groups and academics for controls over the flows of money-capital across borders. Whereas previous capital controls under the apartheid state were necessary to maintain state power in the interests of Afrikaner capital, for any new capital controls to be progressive, they would have to have the objective of transformation of social relations with a greater empowerment of labour. The range of policy measures which Alami suggests to achieve this objective, involving as they would substantial regulation of foreign exchange and other financial markets, does raise the question of how far state capture has gone that would prevent such policies even being proposed by a South African government (or most others around the world). The political question of how to mobilise popular support for such policies in the face of global capital mobility remains as yet unanswered.

The state, whether captured or not, interacts with its citizens in many guises. One is through the collection of taxes. In a fascinating account of boat traders and their relations with state agents on the River Congo in the DRC, Maria Eriksson Baaz , Ola Olsson and Judith Verweijen show how payments to different state authorities on the river by boat traders carrying goods and people along the river are regarded by the traders as legitimate taxes and the extent to which they regard such payments as official, the DRC authorities having made certain payments illegal. In spite of their illegality, many of these payments are still made to recognised state authorities such as military personnel stationed on the river. One factor determining the legality of a payment is whether it provides a service worth paying for, rescue from capsizing for instance, rather than whether it is within the letter of the law or collected by state agents. The authors suggest that our distinctions between official and unofficial, or indeed between legitimate and corrupt, are not necessarily relevant or helpful in understanding how such taxes are accepted and how the money collected is apportioned. In this case we see taxation, both legal and illegal used to fund the provision of services and used to remunerate the service providers directly in the absence of a conventional paid employment system.

The Debates section of this issue is larger than usual as it is devoted to the ROAPE/Third World Network workshop on Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa held in Accra last November. This is the first of a series of three workshops which ROAPE has sponsored across the continent in cooperation with local organisations. A similar version of the second, held in Dar es Salaam in April of this year will appear in a forthcoming issue. These workshops deliberately avoided an academic character and included a substantial proportion of activists from across the continent as well as academics and those who fit both descriptions. The feedback from participants has been very positive as is evidenced by the response of speakers and other participants alike in respectively submitting their presentations and blogposts. The workshops have been filmed and we are planning for them to be available on our website. Most importantly for ROAPE, they reflected the journal’s original political purpose: to deliver a forum for progressive and socialist activists and academics on the African continent which provides an analysis of African realities that will assist, however modestly, progressive forces in their struggles against corporate imperialism. The workshops also reflect the other founding purpose of the journal: to find or stimulate answers to the question of what is to be done to effect radical change, a question more on the agenda today than ever before.

The full issue can be accessed on the Taylor and Francis website here.

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 and a member of the EWG.

Featured Photograph: part of the Diego Rivera 1934 mural ‘El hombre en cruce de caminos’ (‘Man at the Crossroads’) in the Bellas Artes building, Mexico City.

On Both Sides of the Berlin Wall: Africa and the Two Germanies

ROAPE

August 1, 2018

By Torben Gülstorff

Knowledge of the involvement of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in events on the African continent after 1945 is limited. The empirical base of the current state of research looks like a patchwork rug – with more holes than cloth. Only a handful of African states have actually been the subject of a case study on this issue and most of these works, if not all, have focused on German diplomacy. Usually Africa ‘policy’ is how this focus is referred to and it is dominated by one thesis. It covers the dominant role of the ‘Hallstein doctrine’ and the West German – East German contradiction in German foreign policies of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s but it neglects the roles of other–interests in German foreign policies, especially economic and geostrategic. In this blogpost for roape.net I am calling this thesis, as well as the whole discourse on German foreign policies/diplomacies, into question.

In 1949 two German states appeared on the world scene. The Federal Republic of Germany, bound to the West, and the German Democratic Republic, bound to the East. As both of its governments claimed to speak for the German people and the German nation, a ‘German-German’ contradiction arose, most notably manifesting itself in their domestic and cultural policies and public diplomacies. In 1955 a West German government delegation travelled to Moscow to restore diplomatic relations. As the West German government feared a similar approach by the GDR, Secretary of State Walter Hallstein declared the establishment of the ‘Hallstein doctrine’. The doctrine stated that recognizing the existence of the GDR and establishing diplomatic relations with it would be seen as an unfriendly act by the FRG, leading to negative consequences for foreign states. It was replaced by the more moderate ‘Scheel doctrine’ in 1969 and finally abrogated in 1973 when the German-German Basic Treaty became law. East Germany established a congenial doctrine in 1967 as well – the ‘Ulbricht doctrine’ – after West Germany’s new eastern policy had led to diplomatic relations with Romania. But be that as it may, in the end, it is the Hallstein doctrine that remains in Germany’s cultural memory.

In both German states politicians used the doctrine to gain political ground. West German politicians utilised it as an official reason why it was necessary to maintain an embassy in nearly every state of the world and East German politicians used it as an explanation that they could present to the East German public and the world why it wasn’t diplomatically present everywhere, namely the hostile attitude of the respective other German state. In the West and in the East historians and political scientists established the doctrine as the main thesis on contemporary German foreign policies. The Hallstein doctrine became the catchphrase of every study on German foreign relations between 1945 and 1972 – in several cases even lasting until 1989. The possibility of the existence of any other interests were never really pursued.

This is quite curious. After World War Two both German states developed quite well – in the context of their respective camps. West Germany went through the famous Wirtschaftswunder, its ‘economic miracle’, and East Germany – even though it never narrowed the gap on its capitalist brother state – also experienced strong economic development. However, no one ever connected the dots and tried to analyse the German countries’ foreign policies in context of their trade and economic policies. This is what I have tried to do.

A New Perspective on German Activities in Africa – the case of the Congo crisis

Yet a glimpse on the German involvement in the Congo crisis shows that national economic and international geostrategic interests dominated German activities. In July 1960, just days after Belgium Congo had become the Republic of Congo (Congo-Léopoldville), the crisis began. Already in the early spring of 1960, Congolese political parties had split up into two different camps. The regionalists, who wanted to decentralize power as they were only strong in their heartlands, and the nationalists, who wanted to centralize power as they had voters in each province of the country. As a result of the first national elections, Patrice Lumumba, leader of the centralistic Mouvement National Congolaise (MNC), became Prime Minister and formed a central government. Joseph Kasavubu, leader of the ethnic Association des Bakongo pour l’Unification, l’expansion et de la Défense de la Langue Kikongo (ABAKO) became President.

In July 1960 the conflict erupted, catalysed by Belgium, several other Western states and international companies which tried to use the conflict to pursue their own economic and geo-strategic interests. On July 5, the Congolese army mutinied when their Belgian officers told them that, even though independent, everything would stay the same in the Congo. Lumumba calmed the situation but on July 11 the state of Katanga proclaimed its independence and in August South-Kasai also broke away. The Congolese army intervened, leading to an actual clash between the regional forces and the central authority. Soon the Congolese government in Léopoldville was affected as well. Kasavubu started to disapprove of Lumumba’s policies openly. The conflict ended with a coup led by Colonel Joseph Mobutu in September. The elected government was annulled and Lumumba as well as several of his party colleagues were arrested.

In January 1961, after Lumumba and his comrades attempted to flee the capital, he and two of his colleagues were shot in Katanga by Belgian forces working with the breakaway government in Katanga. In the meanwhile, many of his supporters and former cabinet members had flown to the heartland of the Mouvement National Congolaise-Lumumba (MNC-L) in the North East of the country. They organised themselves in the region’s capital Stanleyville, where they proclaimed a second Congolese state. It existed until autumn 1961, when the governments of Léopoldville and Stanleyville reached an agreement to reunite. But the Lumumbists had been tricked. In the following months they were persecuted and faced reprisals. Many went underground or flew into the neighbouring Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) where they established a rebel movement. In 1964, they started a second uprising in and around Stanleyville and were able to conquer half the country.

In the meantime, the ‘independent state’ of Katanga was able to raise enough mercenaries to build up an effective army which was able to offer resistance against the army of the Congo until 1963. Only the intervention of the United Nations forced Katanga’s reunification with the Congo. South Kasai was easier to handle. It was already reunited with the Congo in 1962. To summarize the Congo Crisis was both an international conflict of constitutional, political, and economic power, and an external conflict of decolonization, the Cold War, and foreign economic interests – the latter being something that the two German states had a lively interest in.

In February 1960, when the famous conference Table ronde belgo-congolaise in Brussels – on which the decolonization of Belgium Congo was discussed – ended, Lumumba and two comrades, were invited to the FRG. In exchange for a written concession to keep the MNC on a pro-western course, support was promised and several offices for the MNC in West Germany were suggested in order to foster German-Congolese economic relations.

In the meantime, in the GDR, Antoine Gizenga, who in July 1960 would become Lumumba’s Vice Prime Minister, had already crossed the German-German border in Berlin in December 1959 to ask the East German government for support and the opportunity to open a Congolese exile government in its capital in case the Table ronde should fail. Even though some in East Berlin saw the country’s independence as another step towards world revolution, it was the Congo’s richness of minerals which became a major issue widely discussed by East Germany’s leadership.

In July 1960, just some days after the Congo had become independent, West Germany switched sides and started to support the anti-Lumumbist movement. Lumumba had given his first official dinner for the West German ambassador and some of his closest German friends, followed by a press conference solely for West German journalists. During these events he and Gizenga had presented their plans for the future: to centralize the government, regional governments should be shut down and replaced by so-called governors, selected by Lumumba himself. As a centralized state was not in the interest of the West and West Germany, the opposition party ABAKO became West Germany’s new favourite. It stood for a strong regionalism and a continuation of the country’s federal constitution. Lumumba and the MNC were its intractable opponents. The FRG supported the opposition by indirectly financing credits and initializing one of its biggest covert operations in Africa. The West German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst was instructed by the chancellery to start ‘Operation Liane’. Over the next decade, about 23 million DM – respectively about 5 to 6 million U.S. dollars – were invested in the printing company Imprimerie Concordia. Financially and technically well equipped, this company soon attained a press monopoly, allowing it direct intervention into Congolese media. Its main objective was to weaken the Lumumbist movement. It had an unparalleled position, not only controlling Congolese media reports but also bribing journalists, editors and politicians as well as security and military officials.

Meanwhile East Berlin continued to develop plans for an extensive East German-Congolese cooperation. It was discussed sending hundreds of East German experts to help industrialize the country, educate its population, open its markets to East German products while extracting Congolese resources for East German industry not to mention exploiting its gold and coltan mines and its diamond fields.

But the Congo crisis thwarted these plans. As we have seen in September 1960 Kasavubu declared Lumumba ‘deposed’. Lumumba countered by arguing that only parliament could depose him and parliament had not. Kasavubu ordered Mobutu, to arrest Lumumba. However, Lumumba was unconfident what to do next and so his enemies finally took the initiative. Lumumba and some of his party colleagues were arrested. Representatives and delegations of the socialist camp had to leave the country. Lumumba’s remaining companions had to flee to Stanleyville taking possession of central treasury resources. With this money, they were able to bribe Congolese soldiers stationed at Stanleyville for several months. The Lumumbists became a military power.

Yet, Lumumba’s arrest at the end of 1960 put a spoke in the East German wheel, though only temporarily. The East had always favoured Vice Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga and parties like the Parti Solidaire Africaine, the Parti du Peuple, the Centre de Regroupement Africain and the Alliance de Bayanzi, whose leaders already in spring 1960 had planned to found a united socialist Congolese party. They supported Gizenga when he flew to Stanleyville and founded a new Congolese Republic, declaring himself Prime Minister. The East including the GDR, started to support the new republic by sending relief supplies via Egypt and the Sudan. East Germany was even asked to print counterfeit notes and the country’s new currency, as the government’s cash funds ran short. But East Berlin asked to get paid for this act of solidarity in advance – an impossible demand for the Stanleyville government. At least East Germany – after several Congolese requests – acknowledged the new republic as a state and in August 1961 even opened an embassy in Stanleyville. Though at that time, Gizenga already had started talks with the new Prime Minister in the capital Léopoldville, Cyrille Adoula. Both governments wanted to reunite, Gizenga not least because his government had run out of money. A mutiny of his troops seemed possible. So Gizenga and Adoula signed a pact. Unity was re-established and the East German embassy had to shut down.

In the meantime, West German companies were highly commercially active in the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga which had been at war with the Congolese central government since August 1960. In 1962 West German industry imported nine percent of its copper and 33 percent of its Cobalt from Katanga via Belgium. There are East German documents and Katanga press releases that even indicate that Deutsche Bank bought about 40 percent of the stocks of Katanga’s largest company, the Union Minières du Haute Katanga.

These are just some examples of German activities during the Congo crisis, but they already show quite clearly that national economic and sometimes even international geo-strategic interests dominated German activities–across both states.

Follow the Money …

Whereas geo-strategic interventions are sometimes hard to find, economic interests are even more often hidden – for various reasons. Studies usually base their economic information on official statistics which often only present a fragmented view of economic transactions. This applies especially to German trade. East German goods often were passed on as part of the German-German trade. They were relabelled as West German products and then went through West German ports to reach their destinations. East Germany also imported African goods via West Germany and the latter didn’t hesitate to trade with Africa via East Germany and several other European states as well. Statistics usually don’t take this transfer via third countries into account and, therefore, present a false picture of German trade – usually simply focusing on Europe.

Another reason for the ‘hidden’ nature of economic interests lies in the confidential character of companies’ investments which usually form an integral part of their business models. Furthermore, investments are decreasingly made by producing companies – to stimulate real economy processes – and increasingly by banks and private investors to stow money away at a safe haven – at a secure investment opportunity – during a financial crisis.

The German case is a powerful example of these processes. Between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s a first small wave of West German investments in Central Africa can be identified. During the Wirtschaftswunder period in the FRG foreign investments flooded the West German money market as its economy seemed to become stronger and stronger. Bonn started to fear an overheating of the West German economy. The solution they found was a cash outflow towards investment projects in the ‘Third World’. In the 1970s, a second, much larger cash outflow took place as the gold parity of the U.S. dollar was cancelled. This led to a financial crisis during which dollar owners tried to win peace in European currencies. They flooded the European money markets. Europe’s answer was to channel redundant money into investment projects in the ‘Third World’ – again also towards the Central African region. The biggest one of these was the German lead multinational investment consortium Association Internationale de l’Industrialisation du Nord-Est du Zaïre with a liquidity of around two billion DM – respectively 830 million dollars.

To understand these investments, where they come from and went to, gives important clues into the background of a foreign power’s engagement in the Central African region. This is especially important, if these powers described their behaviour as ‘selfless’ and ‘principled’ as was usually the case with the FRG and the GDR.

The Economic View – a new perspective on the German contribution to modern global history

The role the two German states played in the world after 1945 is still underestimated, not least owing to the Hallstein doctrine and the German-German contradiction. This prism of understanding dominates our thinking on German economic or geostrategic interests in the world after 1945. Both German states were, sometimes more, sometimes less, involved in the events of decolonization and the Cold War in Africa and the rest of the ‘Third World.’ In the Central African region, they played a role in all major conflicts; not just the Congo crisis, but in the Angolan colonial war, in the Angolan crisis, in the uprising of the Union des populations du Cameroun in Cameroon and in the Chadian fight against the Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad.

To ignore this involvement leaves important parts of the puzzle of global history unsolved. It therefore can be reasonably productive to look beyond the typical powerhouses of Washington, Moscow, Peking, Paris or London. Bonn and East Berlin can also be useful in filling out the blank spaces on the map of world history. But this is only possible if historians, researchers and activists start to accept that German interests didn’t stop at German borders and that these interests were mostly of economic origin – on both sides of the Berlin wall.

Torben Gülstorff is a freelance historian. In 2016 he completed his PhD in contemporary history and has worked on the history of West and East German activities in Africa after 1945. He supports the still ongoing UN investigation into the death of former UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld as a researcher.

Featured Photograph: An example of a 10 francs note showing Patrice Lumumba drawn in the GDR, possibly by an employee of the Foreign Office or one of the ‘Wertpapierdruckerei Leipzig.’ (Political Archive of the Foreign Office (PA AA), section Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MfAA), A 17295, Folder 2, Fiche 2, p. 197).

For Zimbabwe’s Downtrodden: an interview with Nelson Chamisa

ROAPE

July 30, 2018

In an interview conducted in 2003, ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig spoke to Nelson Chamisa. Chamisa was then the National Youth Chairperson of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) In the early 2000s, the MDC was a very different organization, founded by a mass movement, with a large working-class membership many in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). For a time, the MDC seemed on the verge of toppling the ruling ZANU-PF, in elections and on the streets. Now leader of the MDC, Chamisa promises his supporters victory in the elections and resistance if he does not win. In 2003 he was a 25-year-old organizer of a mass party, who, in this interview, reflects on his own activism as a student militant, his hope for socialist change and life as a Member of Parliament.

Leo: Can you tell me about yourself and the position that you hold in Zimbabwe?

Nelson: Currently I hold quite a number of positions. Of course, the first one is I am a Member of Parliament for a constituency in Zimbabwe called Kwadzana and I am also the National Youth Chairperson in the MDC, ever since the inception of the party in 1999. I was elected in an inaugural congress in 2000 as the Youth Chairperson. I have been a student leader as Secretary General of the Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU) from 1998-2000. I was also the Student Representative Council president for Harare polytechnic 1998-9 and also 1999-2000. I served two terms of office. I had to leave my position when the party was fully fledged. It was no longer possible for me to balance activities as a political activist and my activities as a student activist.

Leo: Can you describe your background, so where you came from. Your family and how you came politically active?

Nelson: I always been active as a young man, although starting at very low levels at school. In primary school I was active on those microcosmic issues about how you get ball-point pens distributed, how you improve your relationship with the teachers, preventing them from beating you and disciplining you and all those things. But I think that I started to be really active in a representative capacity at my secondary school which was in Masvingo province. For my A levels at Victoria High I was then active in the debating club on national issues. We actually managed to be political at that level, headmasters expect you to accept everything as gospel, but we became critical and we did not accept the patronizing attitudes that were typical in High School. I then went to polytechnic where I started my radical activism.

This was in March 1998, when I got to the polytechnic, conditions there were quite appalling, and I found that students had no freedom to make their own decisions, to represent themselves and to articulate their own issues about academic freedom and the autonomy of tertiary education within the broad framework of governance. So, we said that should not be the case, and we sort of rekindled activism. I felt we needed to reinvigorate the student movement and we managed to do that. We then engaged in joint activities under the umbrella of ZINASU on anti-privatisation demonstration and anti-corruption demonstrations in 1998, which led to the closure of the polytechnic and the University of Zimbabwe (UZ).

You have already touched on it, but can you talk about the motivation for those closures?

Definitely there was a question of the payout and corruption in the corridors of government. But the most important historical event that motivated us to say, ‘It is possible for a student movement to make a difference in a country’ is what had happened in Jakarta in Indonesia [the Indonesian revolution in 1998 which eventually led to the resignation of President Suharto]. It played a very critical role – the Indonesian revolution, it was possible there it could also be in Harare. Most of the songs we were singing had do with Suharto being overthrown.

Can you remember any of the songs?

Of course, I can sing one of them. [He starts to sing] ‘Suharto aenda nengoro yemoto, Kana uchienda kuenda tanga wadhingura Mugabe.’ Meaning to say that, Mugabe has been overthrown, it is possible to remove Mugabe. If you want us to progress let us remove Mugabe because if we remove Mugabe all our problems will be solved. So, the motivation was to say that as students we were becoming the vanguard of the struggle. You must know that students usually have this microcosmic approach to issues, they deal with campus issues, like payouts, questions of freedom in higher learning but on this one we were trying to nationalise the student agenda, to be of consequence to a broader body politics in the country. We managed to make an impact, literally business was bought to a standstill during all of these demos. The closure of these institutions played a pivotal role in ensuring that the agenda and message that students were communicating was received by everyone across the country and we were very happy. Of course, the closure of institutions showed us that there were problems of students linking and connecting to broader issues, it was also a process of students learning to play a national political role.

Ideologically how did you describe yourself, define yourself at this time?

We believed in socialism, big time. We were socialists. I think it would be unfair and a distortion of history for any activists to talk about student activism without mentioning socialism and International Socialist Organisation (ISO). I was a member of ISO and quite an active member. ISO is a very significant chapter in the history of student activism. Most of our comrade and most of those before us Tendai Biti – who is now an MP – as a student activist, Learnmore Jongwe, Sikhala, Brian Kagoro, Hopewell Gumbo, myself we were all very active in ISO and our politics was motivated by that kind of radicalism. Especially at the polytechnic, we even had a branch and it gave us the motivation and helped develop us politically – ‘this is how we should take our struggle forward.’ Those debates were very important for us, because they focused us on bread and butter issues and on questions of privatization and politics. It emanated from our understanding of education as a right from a socialist perspective. But my heart bleeds if you look at the situation now, those things have just died down, we need to rekindle that kind of spirit. Because it has molded some of us in the hope that it would change the whole of society.

You came from a movement that had been anti-privatization, that was informed by the ideas of socialism – inspired by the lessons of Indonesia and revolution. The movement you wanted to create was equally radical and for the poor. Is that how you envisaged it?

Yes definitely. It was a poor people’s movement. These are the people who were suffering, workers who are poor saying, ‘It is now the time.’ And it was the period of radicalisation that was the motivation for us…

Once the MDC was formed on 11 September 1999, there was incredible support for the new party. In 2000 you had the referendum vote and then in June the election. It must have been an incredible period?

We just felt that finally people were beginning to understand. In fact, it was a rude awaking for Mugabe, we gave him a warning that he was finished. In June we got 57 seats, under conditions of violence and intimidation. I was now active full-time in politics [see Peter Alexander’s account of the historic 2000 elections].

Briefly can you tell me what were you saying to students at the time? Obviously, it was mobilization for payouts, but what about broader politics?

By the late 1990s they knew that it was not possible for the movement to provide for them but that it required a broader transformation… we were fighting the struggle from very many angles, to go and get what we needed from the department of education and the government. So, we were fighting from within and from without.

As a militant during this period, as the movement was rising constantly, the transition to democracy and to an MDC government, did you feel this was imminent, that it was going to happen within months?

That was my feeling. Although it has been delayed, we feel that it is an inevitable end and we will have a government for the people that will look at the issues for the poor, and fight for them.

Can you speak a little about the period of the formation of the MDC? At this time, you were trying to push radical politics and discussion in the new party?

Look at those pictures [he points to the wall of his office, where there are photos]. That was on the 11 September, that one, when the party was formed. Yes, when we were forming the party, we did it as Marxists. Those were some of the demonstrations that we were on [he points to more photos]. This was during the campaign [another photograph on his desk]. I was elected unanimously, even in my absence I was not there. Because of my history as a student activist, people knew me. But surprisingly there was serious resistance from the leadership of the party who I think were being influenced by certain neo-liberal sectors in the country, to say these people are too radical, they are too young. But the very reason for forming the party was to create space for young people.

The argument against you standing was that you were a loose cannon, with this radical background.

Exactly.

You described yourself as believing in socialism, yet you found yourself in a party that was rapidly advocating the policies of economic adjustment and austerity that you had rejected in the 1990s and that the MDC had been established to fight against. How did this play out?

We had a bourgeoisie element who came into the party to try to hijack the process and they succeeded for a period – in 2001 – in terms of writing polices that deviated from our original plans. So, they were altering some of the policies for their own neo-liberal ends, but we have been fighting in the party to refocus. The economic documents that they produced were a kind of bourgeois celebration. I think we have been trying to work on that, we are almost like a salad bowl – all these pieces coming in – but those capitalist elements were becoming dominant.

Naturally when you have a rising movement and party, you tend to see people from the middle class come in with their very fancy ideas, who can defend their ideas in boardrooms and on the internet. Really poor people don’t have access to internet, don’t have access to debates at the level of the boardroom. So, the hijacking I am talking about saw the manipulation of what the party stands for in the outside world. It is part of the serious flaws of the movement.

For a time, you were influenced by the socialist lawyer and activist Munyaradzi Gwisai [Gwisai was a leading socialist in the MDC and MP for Highfield, a working-class constituency in Harare, he was expelled by the party in 2002 and stood in Highfield as an independent socialist later that year]. Can you tell me something about this?

It was very sad Gwisai was expelled from the party, it was a victory for the neo-liberal forces within the MDC, some of us who feel that Gwisai was correct, in fact I agree with comrade Gwisai in every aspect. In terms of the party what he would say in the party I would support him thoroughly. I did not support the decision of the executive to expel him, the revolution is beginning to devour its own children, especially the shinning stars of the struggle. Those who were the vanguards of the struggle. It is really sad. I hope that Gwisai will find a way back into the movement and I think this is the contradiction within the struggle. I found it difficult to campaign for our candidates in Highfield against Gwisai. I feel that Munyaradzi had deserved to win. I would have celebrated more if he had won. That is all I can say. It was unfortunate development. It is sad to be part of an executive which makes such a capitalist decision.

Can you reflect on your political journey and your motivations as an activist and now MP?

We formed this party to realise certain objectives, and those objectives have not been realised. It might not be the MDC which is ultimately going to fulfill these hopes, but we have started from somewhere, and the germ that we have started will ultimately be completed by some of us. This is what has been our thrust and this is what will continue to be our thrust. It was not started as a sectional project, rather a project for the poor and the poor should be finally rewarded in the project that they started. Not giving back to the bourgeoisie, not rewarding the fat-bellied politicians who hijack the cause of the downtrodden of our society. This is our project.

Nelson Chamisa is currently the MDC Alliance President and member of the House of Assembly for Kuwadzana, Harare.

Featured Photograph: Nelson Chamisa speaking on Worker’s Day in Zimbabwe (1 May, 2018)

Rwanda’s House of Sand: Brutality, Lies and Complicity

ROAPE

July 26, 2018

Rwanda’s much-vaunted development success has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. First, a series of papers and blogs have questioned claims by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) that poverty decreased by 6 percentage points between 2010 and 2014 (see Filip Reyntjens’ blogpost on African Arguments; a 2016 ROAPE paper and several blogpost on roape.net Exposing the Donor Darling and The Evidence Mounts). Second, inconsistencies have been found between Rwandan household survey data (HHS) and National Accounts Statistics (NAS), raising the prospect that Rwanda’s GDP growth figures may have been overestimated over the past decade (see Faking it: Rwandan GDP Growth Myth).

Knowing whether Rwanda’s success claims are real is crucial at a time when the government’s political legitimacy is being eroded by mounting human rights abuses, deteriorating political freedom, and new challenges to the official genocide history promoted by the Rwandan government. In view of this, we would like to thank Dónal Ring for contributing to this important debate, and we would also like to respond to some of the specific claims made in his blog. It is through scrutiny and critical interactions of this kind, that we will hopefully be able to resolve some of these questions.

On poverty, Dónal Ring suggests that the increase in poverty might be an artefact of the chosen price index (Laspeyre) and suggests that ‘releasing the results for other indices would strengthen [the] argument.’ The Laspeyre index was chosen because it yielded results that were closest to the original poverty estimates, so we assumed that this was the index that was used in the original study. Even though the Laspeyre index tends to over-estimate inflation, it was not used to update the poverty line from 2010 to 2014, but to estimate intra-year inflation, as well as regional price differences within each survey. Consequently, the price index cannot account for the increase in poverty between the two surveys.

The requested results for other price indices are posted in the table below. While these results were not reported in the original blogpost, they were contained in the syntax files that were provided with that post. As the table shows, the increases in poverty using the Paasche and Fisher price indices range between +7.2 and +11.5 for all poverty lines that were presented in the original blogpost. In other words, they strengthen the conclusions of that earlier blogpost.

	Average Basket		Updated Basket		Minimum Basket		Reyntjen’s Basket		Survey-specific basket
	2010	2014	2010	2014	2010	2014	2010	2014	2010	2014
Poverty rate Paasche Index)	42.3	52.2	46.6	57.5	32.4	43.9	29.6	38.7	44.2	52.5
Change (Paasche)		+9.9*		+10.9*		+11.5*		+9.1*		+8.3*
Poverty rate (Fisher Index)	43.8	51.1	47.8	56.5	33.8	43.2	30.9	38.1	45.6	51.3
Change (Fisher)		+7.3*		+8.6*		+9.4*		+7.2*		+5.7*

*Change is statistically significant at 5%

Poverty estimates using Paasche and Fisher Index, as well as a ‘non-constant’ poverty line

As rightly noted by Sam Desiere, the question of which inflation rate we consider (not which price index) is crucial to answering the question on poverty. This is not a trivial technical detail, but a real question about how much food Rwandan farmers were actually able to purchase with their income over this period. Further research into this question would therefore be desirable. At the moment, the best estimates presented by Sam Desiere and others indicate the inflation faced by the rural poor was significantly higher than the stated national inflation rate. The reasons for the higher prices faced by rural poor have been explored by An Ansoms, Neil Dawson and others, and have to do with, amongst other things, forced mono-cropping, and local market failures.

Dónal Ring’s second claim on the comparison of ‘constant’ poverty lines is not valid in this case, as it builds on a misunderstanding of the World Banks’s position on this issue. The cited paper makes a general conceptual point about the fact that poverty is a changing concept over time (you cannot assess poverty in the UK by the same standard you assess poverty in Rwanda, or by the same standard you assessed poverty in the UK 50 years ago). This sensible conceptual point does not in any way translate into a methodological endorsement of the types of changes in the poverty line that NISR undertook between EICV 3 and 4. NISR did not only update the poverty line to account for new consumption patterns, they changed the type of poverty line from an average consumption basket (reflecting people’s actual consumption patterns) to a minimum consumption basket (reflecting the minimum consumption required to meet 2100kcal/day). While updating the poverty line to account for changes in consumption patterns is sometimes acceptable and advisable, it is never legitimate to estimate a poverty trend by comparing different types of poverty lines. Even if there is not change in the type of poverty line used, any updating of the consumption basket should be accompanied by serious robustness checks to ensure that the updating itself is not driving the observed changes in poverty, as happened in Rwanda.

The World Bank’s argument about updating the poverty line over time is typically used in the context of growing economies with rapid poverty reduction, and usually has the effect of reducing poverty reduction. The argument is that, as economies grow and people become richer, their tastes and needs will become more expensive, as they turn towards higher quality foods. Consequently, the cost of the basket needed to meet the minimum standard increases, and thus the poverty line should increase. The argument does not apply in reverse: if poverty increases, people will tend to turn towards lower quality foods. This means that the food basket becomes cheaper. But it does not necessarily mean that we should lower the poverty line. The reason is that this reduction in the cost of the food basket reflects negative coping strategies and a deterioration of living standards, rather than a voluntary change in consumption patterns.

For full transparency, we nonetheless present the results for the updated food basket, reflecting changes in consumption patterns between 2010 and 2014. The poverty line is called the ‘survey-specific poverty line’ and shows an increase in poverty of between 5.7 and 8.3 between 2010 and 2014. The increase in poverty is slightly less pronounced than for the other poverty lines due to the fact that people have shifted to lower quality foods between 2010 and 2014, which in itself is further evidence of deteriorating living standards. This result was already available in the previously published syntax files (poverty line called: acttotpoor) but had not been included in the original blogpost for the reasons explained above.

Secondly, we turn to the issue of GDP growth. Here, we need to distinguish between (1) past growth performance, (2) current growth performance, and (3) future growth performance.

Starting with the question of past growth performance, Ring claims that that we had used the findings of a discrepancy between the NAS (National Agricultural Survey) and HHS to claim that NISR had manipulated growth figures. What the paper actually said was that: ‘This [discrepancy between NAS and HHS figures] does not constitute incontrovertible proof that GDP growth rates have been overestimated in Rwanda, since there are different factors listed above that could explain such discrepancies.’ The ‘reasons listed above’ included all the points mentioned by Ring, and even included references to the papers cited by Ring. Furthermore, in the follow-up comments to the blogpost, which are available below the original post, we proposed the following three hypotheses to explain the discrepancy. All of these hypotheses raise serious questions about the quality and sustainability of Rwandan growth:

“– Hypothesis 1: Both NAS and HHS figures are correct. In this scenario, the discrepancies between NAS and HHS figures would be due to differences in definition, coverage, etc. between the two measures. For instance, GDP figures include government spending and investments, which may not be reflected in household consumption. This hypothesis would seem plausible, given the type of investments identified above (debt-financed, loss-making prestige and luxury projects), which would not typically be expected to benefit average households. As such, it would strengthen concerns about the regressive and unsustainable nature of government expenditures in Rwanda. However, if this hypothesis were correct, we should expect to find a decrease in final household consumption estimated from the NAS, which is not the case (Household final consumption expenditure grew by 6.5% per year according to the WDI – World Development Indicators – databank).

– Hypothesis 2: NAS figures are correct but HHS figures under-estimate household consumption. This might for instance be the case if, as it often happens, rich households systematically under-report income/consumption or refuse to take part in the survey. In this scenario, GDP per capita would indeed have grown at 4.5%, but this growth has disproportionately benefitted rich urban households that are not adequately captured by the HHS. Such an explanation would be good news for growth but very bad news for inequality, since it would mean that the totality of Rwanda’s economic growth in recent years has gone to rich households, while average incomes for the rest of the population would have deteriorated. This hypothesis, however, seems to be incompatible with the claimed increase in agricultural value added (+3.9% annually between 2010 and 2013), since this is the sector that is known to have experienced serious problems in recent years. Furthermore, NAS figures also claim an increase in manufacturing (+6.4%/ year) and services (+8.3%/ year), which doesn’t leave much room to explain the decreasing consumption levels. This leaves us with a third hypothesis.

– Hypothesis 3: HHS figures are correct but NAS figures over-estimate GDP per capita growth. This is the so-called ‘manipulation’ hypothesis. This is obviously the most controversial and difficult to prove hypothesis, so we leave it open for other researchers to explore through more robust methods, if possible. Given what we now know about poverty numbers, as well as recent reports of possible manipulation in the health sector, this is a hypothesis that should be taken seriously.”

It should have been easy for NISR to settle this discussion long ago by simply explaining the source of the discrepancy between NAS and HHS figures, as has been done in Botswana and elsewhere where such discrepancies have been found. NISR’s failure to provide an explanation until now does not strengthen their credibility. Unfortunately, Ring does not provide any new evidence to help solve this puzzle. This would have been a valuable research contribution, and we hope that Ring or others will take it up to help understand what why Rwanda’s seemingly spectacular growth performance does not appear to translate into improved wellbeing for Rwandan households.

Regarding current growth performance, Ring claims that the blogpost presented an excessively negative picture of the Rwandan economy, because it presented data at the lowest point of an economic downturn, and that the economy has since improved. First, it is important to point out that those figures were the most recent available at the time of publication. Consequently, the blog presented an accurate and up-to-date picture of the Rwandan economy at the time it was posted.

The second problem with this argument is that it uses NISR data to show that the situation has improved. Ring, like Lee Crawfurd, also makes ample use of NISR’s own statistics, to disprove the claims of increasing poverty and stalling growth. The problem with this line of argument is its circularity: if what is in question is the credibility of NISR statistics, then it does not help to present more NISR statistics to prove the credibility of the first set of NISR statistics. If NISR has intentionally or unintentionally produced misleading poverty and potentially also GDP statistics, then why should we believe the statistics that they produce on investments, inflation, etc.?

This is not to say that all statistics are false, and no progress has been realized. But to date we simply don’t know what share of Rwanda’s much vaunted success is real, what part is cosmetic, and what part is down to fake statistics. The only way to restore the credibility of NISR statistics would be to have them independently verified by independent institutions or academics. The fact that the World Bank and IMF repeat NISR’s numbers does not constitute sufficient proof of accuracy, since those institutions do not have a mandate to approve official national statistics. This is why we have repeatedly called on NISR to release their raw data and syntax files, so that their calculations can be subjected to the same scrutiny that we have invited for our own estimates.

Ring also tries to shore up the credibility of NISR statistics by pointing to the fact that Rwanda has been ranked as having the fifth statistical capacity on the continent. The problem with this argument is that NISR’s statistical capacity has never been in question. The problem is its independence. NISR, like virtually all institutions in Rwanda, are subservient to the executive power, rather than serving as a counterweight. It is well-known that Rwanda’s judiciary lacks independence, and that its legislative authority never contradicts the president. The same can be presumed to be true for NISR. In fact, since our blogs were posted, a number of different sources have, independently of each other, come out to claim that health statistics, foreign investment, etc. have been manipulated (see Mail on Sunday article cited above). So, the credibility of NISR statistics has, if anything, been further eroded since the time we posted our first blog.

Finally, we turn to the issue of future growth prospects. Here, we share much of Ring’s analysis, both when it comes to the past success of some of the neo-patrimonial ventures undertaken in Rwanda, and as regards the future risks of this development model. However, we would argue that Ring’s assessment underestimates the weaknesses of the current regime on several points:

Doing business: it is true that Rwanda ranks well on the doing business ranking. But, as the recent Rwigara case shows (and earlier Rujigiro case) serious problems remain with regards to enforcement of property rights. This is a major component of a healthy investment climate, and explains why Rwanda still attracts surprisingly little FDI, despite it’s very positive Doing Business ranking.
Corruption: It is undeniable that progress has been made on stamping out petty corruption. But again, this rosy assessment should be nuanced: First, the Transparency International ranking builds on self-reported perceptions of corruption. Given the authorities’ control, self-reported indicators should always be treated with caution in Rwanda. In fact, the Rwandan coordinator of Transparency International was assassinated while investigating high level corruption. Secondly, recent revelations in the Panama Papers about high ranking officials’ secret bank accounts, reveal that high-level corruption is still thriving in Rwanda.
Discipline and good management: There have undoubtedly been elements of good technocratic management in Rwanda, as indeed there were under the previous regime up until 1990. However, the rapid accumulation of public debt for unprofitable vanity projects, such as RwandAir, the Kigali Convention Centre, and more recently, the controversial Arsenal deal, show that the regime is taking exceedingly high risk and spending vast sums of money on questionable ventures. Time will tell if these are visionary developmental gambles, or just another case of neo-patrimonial hubris.

In conclusion, we can say that there is overwhelming and publicly verifiable evidence that poverty increased by a substantial amount between 2010 and 2014 in Rwanda, and that NISR’s poverty statistics were grossly misleading. This conclusion stands for all reasonable assumptions regarding the choice of poverty line, price index, and methods used to estimate the trend. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence from different sources that this and other statistical errors were intentional and aimed at misleading the public and covering up serious policy failures.

The discrepancies between NAS and HHS growth figures remain unexplained, as no new evidence has been provided by NISR or Ring to explain the discrepancies we noted in our original blogpost. Therefore, all the conclusions in that blogpost with regards to Rwanda’s growth statistics still stand. We reiterate our invitation to interested researchers to use more sophisticated methods to try to estimate Rwanda’s real GDP growth rates and to explain the discrepancies between NAS and HHS figures.

The authors of this article have asked for anonymity.

Featured Photograph: President Paul Kagame speaking at the London Summit on Family Planning, Department for International Development (11 July, 2012).

Ruth First Prize

ROAPE

July 24, 2018

The Editorial Working Group of Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) is pleased to announce the 2017 winner of the Ruth First prize. The prize is awarded for the best article published by an African author in the journal in a publication year. This year, the prize was awarded to Papa Faye for his article The Politics of Recognition, and the Manufacturing of Citizenship and Identity in Senegal’s Decentralised Charcoal Market.

The ROAPE Prize Committee commented on Faye’s article: ‘the fieldwork contribution was impressive, as was the broader engagement with literature on identity politics and recognition. The paper’s discussion of how national policies (however they were conceived) were shaped within the local political economy was sensitively done, and very interesting.’

The article shows how state politics of (re)allocation of rights and resources to social groups within a society (recognition) are constructive of distinct abilities to shape the fate of the political economy of natural resources (citizenship) and of specific images of self (identities). It was published in ROAPE Volume 44, Issue 151 in Spring 2017 and can be read for free by clicking here.

Papa Faye holds PhDs in Sociology from Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar and in Social Anthropology from University of Bern in Switzerland. His research focuses on decentralized forestry, agricultural land management, and agribusiness and human rights in Africa. He is research associate to many institutions including the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Initiative Prospective Agricole et Rurale (IPAR) and the Social Dimensions to Environmental Policy (SDEP) at the Geography Department of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Papa has been awarded in 2017 a research grant by the Open Society Foundations Fellowship Program in New York. He is currently co-founder and Executive Secretary of a new Action-Research center based in Dakar, known as Centre d’Action pour le Développement et la Recherche.

Again, Is Imperialism Still Imperialism? A Reply to Esteban Mora

ROAPE

July 24, 2018

By Walter Daum

Esteban Mora begins his contribution to the roape.net discussion of the David Harvey-John Smith debate by asserting that the whole debate over who drains value from whom is misguided. While Smith says the West continues to drain the East and Harvey holds that the direction has been reversed, Mora believes that both claims rest on the ‘misconception’ arising from dependency theory that the imperialist North drains value from the imperialized South. [1] This, he says, is ‘not entirely accurate,’ and he goes on to make further claims which, as I see it, amount to arguing that imperialism as classically defined by Marxists does not exist – and for that matter never did.

Mora’s argument goes through several steps. He first points out that Northern and Southern capitalists both exploit the South, which is undeniably true. The rate of profit is higher in the South, he says, because of Southern industry’s less developed organic composition of capital, and both Northern and Southern capitalists benefit from it. But this reasoning is off-target. Mora overlooks the enormous super-exploitation of Southern labor (in fact, he never mentions any kind of exploitation), the main reason that profit rates from production in the South are higher. Moreover, the organic composition need not be much lower in the South; many Southern factories use up-to-date technology.

Second, Mora rejects the dependency-theory notion of a ‘correlative movement between rising profits and diminishing profits.’ It is not clear whether the rising profits are meant to be those produced in the North or those captured by Northern capitalists wherever produced, and likewise for the diminishing profits of the South. But since he is aiming to refute the ‘drain’ of profits, we have to assume that he is denying that Northern capitalists capture greater profits than Southern capitalists. On this, John Smith has shown in his book and in this online discussion that, Apple, for example, makes a much higher rate of profit than the contractors who produce its devices in China. And I gave evidence in my contribution to the debate that ‘the surplus-value flow from the U.S. to China does not match that extracted from China by the West.’

Mora seems to disagree:

If we go to the data for world corporate profits or FDI, etc … we realize the South or ‘emerging’ economies are not only profiting at almost the same level as the North in absolute terms (for example, the 10 biggest Chinese companies in the Fortune 500 have revenues for 2,11 trillion dollars, while the 10 biggest US companies in the same list have revenues for 2,22 trillion), but that this means a superior dominance in portfolio investments or dividends than the North in relative terms.

By ‘relative terms’ Mora presumably means the rate, not just the mass, of profits, since his numbers suggest that the mass of profits in South and North are comparable. His data derive from the Emerging Market Multinationals Report by Lourdes Casanova and Anne Miroux, published in 2016 by Cornell University. But this report’s conclusions do not back up the idea that Southern profit rates are higher than Northern. For example, they state:

Overall, the average profit margins of eMNCs [emerging market multinational corporations] lag behind that of their US and Japanese counterparts for instance. Emerging Multinationals appear to be looking for growth in revenues rather than profit margins for the moment. The differences are relatively significant, whether one considers the E20 firms as a whole (27% of the eMNCs in the Fortune Global 500 achieve a profit margin above 5% versus 39% if one considers the whole Fortune Global 500) or at the industry level…

This means that while 27% of Southern (emerging market) multinationals make a profit rate over 5%, a notably greater proportion – 44% – of Northern multinationals do so. There are other ways to measure the rates of profits of firms from different countries, but this is the source Mora chose to cite, and it does not justify his conclusion that the Southern economies achieve a ‘superior dominance’ in rates of return.

As a third step in his argument, Mora invokes Lenin to back up his claim that Southern and Northern capitalists are comparably profitable. He writes, ‘We have to go back to the notion from Lenin’s Imperialism where ‘central’ states and ‘peripheral’ states are all ‘agents of financial capital’, and not simply the ‘central’ ones that operate against the ‘peripheral’ ones.’

This is a very strange assertion. First of all, the words that Mora seems to quote – ‘central states, ‘peripheral states, and ‘agents of financial capital’ – do not appear in Lenin’s book at all. Not even the term ‘financial capital’ appears, because Lenin’s well known thesis about the predominant capitals in the imperialist countries refers not to the financial firms as such but to ‘finance capital,’ the term he borrowed from Hilferding signifying the combination of bank and industrial capital. And on that, Lenin produces data to show that in the early twentieth century four countries – Britain, France, Germany and the United States – owned nearly 80% of all finance capital. Lenin sums up: ‘In one way or another, nearly the whole of the rest of the world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these international banker countries, these four ‘pillars’ of world finance capital’ (see Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter 3). That is, for Lenin and contrary to Mora, not all states are dominant agents of finance capital; only the imperialist states are. Others are tributaries.

Mora makes his mistaken claim specific in a further appeal to the authority of Lenin. Citing the theories of Lenin and Bukharin, he writes, ‘For these writers all nation-states, whether bigger or smaller, were considered imperialists or agents of financial imperialist capital.’ No, Lenin did not regard all nations, big or small, powerful or weak, as imperialist. Lenin (and Bukharin, and likewise Luxemburg) explained to the contrary that the nations of the world were divided into two categories – the imperialists and those they dominated and exploited. Lenin said that ‘the division of nations into oppressor and oppressed … forms the essence of imperialism.’ Anyone is entitled to disagree with Lenin or Marx on this or any other question, even in a Marxist discussion. But to claim Lenin as a co-thinker, on a disputed question in which Lenin’s exact opposite view is well known, is unwise.

Mora summarizes his brief essay by observing that dependency theory has been refuted by the capitalist penetration of agriculture and industry in the South. Indeed, one claim by some dependency theorists was that imperialism doomed the South to underdevelopment, and there is no question that some formerly underdeveloped countries have undergone remarkable growth and development. But that isn’t all that dependency had to say: the most prominent dependency claim was that Northern capital extracted enormous amounts of value from the Southern countries. And that remains true today, even though some (a relative handful) of formerly underdeveloped countries now exhibit some features in common with the imperialist powers.

Mora concludes that there has been ‘an inversion of positions between North and South,’ but he is quick to add that this does not mean that the North has become the dependent part of the globe. What he appears to be saying is that North and South are now pretty much equal, and that if any countries are imperialist then all are. This too is an absolutely untenable claim.

The reality that Mora ignores was described vividly by Adam Mayer in his entry in this discussion:

It is beyond absurd to compare the status of the Western proletariat … in core Western countries and those outside those countries. Even if a Western unemployed person is materially poorer than a Southern or Eastern unemployed person, the former owns (in a very immediate sense) a passport that is worth literally dying for (as African migrants, and Asian migrants, demonstrate day to day, tragically). … When the wretched of the Earth die to reach the shores of the People’s Republic of China at sea, and not the shores of Australia as they currently do, that is precisely when I will be ready to follow Harvey’s take on imperialism to the extent that ‘reversing the roles has perhaps just advanced beyond its very inception’…[2]

The dependency theorists got a good deal wrong. But they were not wrong to call attention to the gross inequality that exists between global North and South, an inequality that has grown even more monstrous today. And their explanation, that the Northern imperialists exploit the labor and resources of the South, is all the more true today. The claim that this drain of value has been inverted, reversed, or merely leveled off flies in the face of reality.

Walter Daum is the author of The Life and Death of Stalinism: a Resurrection of Marxist Theory (1990) and articles on Marxist economic analysis. He taught mathematics at the City College of New York for 35 years.

Featured Photograph: Policing the Mediterranean. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean, heading to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos (January 2016).

Notes

[1] Mora explicitly places Japan in the West, alongside Europe and the U.S. while Harvey put it in his East, alongside China. So, Mora’s West aligns with the more common ‘Global North.’

[2] As a resident of the U.S. I must add that the same desperate conditions drive migrants and refugees from Central America to the U.S.’s Southern border, on journeys that risk death to where they face imprisonment and now the kidnapping of their children by the imperialist state.

Senegal’s Street Fighting Years

ROAPE

July 19, 2018

ROAPE’s Remi Adekoya interviews the researcher and activist Pascal Bianchini. For years Bianchini has been researching and writing on protest, activism and the left in Senegal and Burkina Faso. He is widely recognized as an expert on student movements on the continent. Based in Dakar, he has undertaken important new research on the major events in Senegal in 1968, and the impact on the left in the years that followed. He sees the explosion of student and worker resistance that year as triggering the growth of radical left politics and organisations in the country and region. Ultimately, these movements led to a period of democratic transformation on the continent that overturned one-party states and dictatorships.

Remi Adekoya: So how did your story with Senegal start?

Pascal Bianchini: For me the story has been quite long, going back to the 1980s when I came here for my PhD fieldwork to investigate the social struggles within the school system as well as education policies connected with these struggles. Right now, I teach at a secondary school in Senegal and am still trying to gather information about the events of 1968 and their aftermath during the 1970’s, which was a very interesting period of what we could describe as ‘revolutionary politics.’ Of course, there are challenges to gathering this kind of information, as these events happened fifty years ago and many of those who actually witnessed them might not always remember so clearly what exactly happened in which month, week etc. Also, many of the political pamphlets being distributed during these events have disappeared as people were afraid to keep them after the government crackdown started soon after the events in 1968.

So, could you briefly recall for us the sequence of events that led to the mass strikes?

A very important event before the 1968 strikes was the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966. This was a major incident in Dakar as well and students went to demonstrate in front of the American and British embassies who they blamed for the coup. Another major event that year in Senegal was the country’s hosting of the World Festival of Black Arts. These two combined events represented the moment when the student movement started to rebuild after being suppressed by president Léopold Senghor in the early 1960s. For instance, the Union générale des étudiants ouest-africains was banned in 1964, but in 1966, the government was forced to accept the existence of the Union des étudiants de Dakar and the Union démocratique des étudiants du Sénégal. They helped create an anti-imperialist atmosphere along, of course, with some other things going on outside Senegal such as the Vietnam War, the Portuguese colonial wars in Guinea Bissau and Angola and Mozambique etc.

The spark for the actual events of 1968 was the government’s decision to cut scholarships for university students, some by half, some by one third. This got students angry and they started a strike on 18 May. They were quickly joined by secondary school pupils who attended the campus strike meetings. On the 27 May, the students started an all-out strike yet two days later Senegalese police raided the campus, it was very violent with many injured and one person killed. Hundreds of students were arrested and sent to a military camp in Ouakam, a small place near to Dakar. This was a shock for the country and workers quickly joined the movement in solidarity. The government responded by arresting trade unionists who were sent to Dodji a military camp in the north of the country.

However, due to mass riots mainly in the capital city of Dakar, the government had to release the activists and start negotiations with them in June. Wages were increased and some other concessions made to reduce tensions. The same thing had to be done in September with the students – so the events of May 1968, in reality, spread across the rest of the year. In 1969, the following year, there was a virtual remake of the crisis, but the government was better prepared to deal with it and prevented the general strike from spreading.

Yet, the main consequence of the 1968 events was that people saw that the regime of Léopold Senghor was not as strong as they had thought it was. Prior to that, Senghor had been able to suppress all opposition to his government and silence his rivals including through the arrest and imprisonment of Prime Minister Mamadou Dia in 1962. But in 1968, the whole country saw that his regime had been weakened and destabilized. This gave young revolutionaries in their twenties the hope and inspiration to commence what I would call the street-fighting years which lasted from 1968 up to the mid-1970s. During this period, there was a lot of unrest and active opposition to a government considered by many to be neo-colonial. The radical left also believed Senghor’s government could be overthrown.

However, Senghor was a shrewd politician and his regime eventually adapted to the situation. He was conscious about his image abroad and did not want to appear as a dictator. By 1974-75, he started to realize he needed a legal opposition. At first, he tried to limit the number of parties that could participate in the political system, and in effect choose his opponents. For instance, Abdoulaye Wade, who in elected President in 2000, was allowed to launch his Parti Démocratique Sénégalais in 1974.

So, in the years 1974-75, the multiparty system was essentially limited to four parties, including one Marxist-Leninist party, the Parti africain de l’indépendance whose ‘historical’ leader Majhemout Diop was allowed to return from exile and to launch a ‘legal PAI’ whereas most of the PAI members continued to operate in secrecy. The system started to open up and many groups challenged the limited nature of the multiparty framework.

By the time Abdou Diouf succeeded Senghor in 1981 to the country had abandon this limited multi-partyism and accept a full multi-party system which at the time was not that common in Africa. We can see how an internal process, started in 1968 and driven by the left, led to major political changes in subsequent years.

What is the condition of the left today in Senegal?

It is in a state of confusion today unfortunately. One of the consequences of the multiparty system was that after one or two decades, various leftist movements and groups entered into alliances with neoliberal parties with all the ideological consequences of that alliance. Many of them also suffered internal splits, not necessarily because of ideological disputes but over personal struggles for leadership. In this complex web of alliances and counter-alliances, it is difficult to grasp what actually remains of the left today. So, to be honest I am not so optimistic about the left today in Senegal.

However, there is still a political culture of struggle that we could describe as a legacy of the 1968 years. The ideological atmosphere today is different, but that culture of social struggle is still very much alive, and the problems essentially remain the same. Just a few weeks ago, a student was killed by the police during a demonstration triggered by delays to payments of scholarships for students, so the exact same issue which led to the 1968 events. In fact, because of the tensions on university campuses, the organizing committee – maybe thanks to some of its members who are close to the government – decided to postpone commemorative events for the 1968 strike till July by which time they hope things will be calmer. So, we basically have an echo of the 1968 events though, of course, in an entirely different ideological atmosphere.

The reasons for the resistance remain but as I said, the situation is different. For instance, today various Islamic religious movements are active on Senegalese university campuses whereas student unions no longer exist in the same form. Also, as I mentioned earlier, since the 1990’s many of the activists of the 1970s and 1980s have been or are now in government or close to government circles. Yet the fundamental issues that provoke opposition remain strikingly similar. For instance, there is the issue of a trade agreement between the EU and Senegal (and other African states) that will essentially see EU goods coming into Senegal without tariffs. There is strong opposition to that in Senegal and in other African countries where such moves are being considered. Also, there is the issue of the CFA currency, which is seen as a colonial currency. So, there are many anti-imperialist sentiments on the ground.

Driving around the streets of Senegal, you can see painted slogans saying, ‘France get out’ (‘France dégage!’) in reference to the many French companies and other French influences many people feel exists in their country. Recently, we have also witnessed the emergence of a movement called ‘Faidherbe Must Fall’ similar to ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ [Louis Léon César Faidherbe was a French colonial general and adminstrator, responsible for much brutality in Senegal] … Still, I would not describe today’s atmosphere as revolutionary, no.

So, what is the future for the left in Senegal?

For years there have been attempts to build a united left, but the reality is that in practice, you either accept the neo-colonial reality with heavy French influence or you stay away from government circles. There are still a few leftist groups with a clear political position, but they are in the minority. For now, the situation doesn’t look very promising but sadly, this is by no means peculiar to Senegal. However, the spirit of struggle and resistance lives on in the country.

Pascal Bianchini is an independent scholar, researcher and activist based in Senegal. He has written extensively on social movements, protest, class and schooling in Africa. His ground-breaking book, Ecole et politique en Afrique noire is published by Karthala.

Featured Photograph: Recent protests in Dakar earlier this year.

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For Zimbabwe’s Downtrodden: an interview with Nelson Chamisa

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Again, Is Imperialism Still Imperialism? A Reply to Esteban Mora

Senegal’s Street Fighting Years

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