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Africa and Capital as Power

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ROAPE
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By Tim Di Muzio

Despite the fact that the ‘capital as power’ approach to critical political economy has been around for some time now, it is not very widely used and/or understood.  Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that it is not widely taught as an approach and it is often too easy for scholars to rely on the more traditional schools of Marxism or neoclassical economics. The purpose of this blogpost is to try to summarize, in clear language, the general approach of capital as power and to highlight some advantages such a perspective may have for understanding, explaining and critiquing aspects of political economy in Africa. 

Though the capital as power approach shares some points of contact with Marxist critiques, it has significant differences with a Marxist approach.  Capital as power recognizes that at least since the dawn of the modern corporation in the United States (the precursors being European joint-stock companies), global political economy has largely been organized by giant firms who are capitalized on the basis of their potential future earnings. For Marxists, earnings or profit are the result of exploiting workers and there’s generally two ways this can be done: through increasing the working day and by intensifying work. So let’s take a quick look at the famous Marxist equation for surplus extraction or what is the same thing, the realization of profit:

M – C – MP/LP – C1 – M1 (there are more sophisticated versions but this is the core formulation)

In this equation the capitalist starts with a sum of money (M), buys commodities or raw materials (C), applies a certain level of technology or means of production (MP) to a definite level of labour power (LP) to produce a new commodity (C1).  This new commodity is sold on the market to realize more money at the end of this process than the capitalist had at the beginning of production (M1). The caveat here is that the product has to be sold before the capitalist can realize her profit, though there is no guarantee that the item can be sold.  This can happen for various reasons to do with a lack of demand for the product but also because, due to the math of capitalist accounting (which is a cost plus system), there is never enough purchasing power for all the goods and services outstanding on the market.  This is a structural feature of capitalism and can only be overcome by credit as long noticed by the too often ignored C.H. Douglas and the social credit movement.

For Marxists, the crucial part of this equation in accounting for profit is labour power (LP). Only by exploiting labour power to a greater or lesser degree can profits go up or down.  This is the famous and ultimately problematic ‘labour theory of value’. The capital as power approach does not reject that labour can be ‘exploited’ in the sense of being poorly paid or mistreated but it does reject that the sole source of corporate earnings is the exploitation of labour power. Instead, the capital as power approach to critical political economy sees corporate earnings as a matter of broad power processes.  In order to generate greater earnings (what we call differential earnings/profits) than their corporate peers, the managers of corporations try to shape and reshape the terrain of social reproduction in their favour – from advertising and marketing to obtaining patents, laws suits, lobbying and the list could continue.  In short, many factors shape the magnitude of corporate earnings. So one of the key questions the capital as power approach asks is how dominant corporations (what we call dominant capital) shape and reshape the social and political process in order to generate differential returns. Two examples should suffice to highlight what I mean here. Consider British Petroleum now known simply as BP. In April 2010 the BP leased Deep Horizon exploded and oil gushed into one of the most sensitive marine environments in the United States. Any investor in BP worth their salt would have immediately shorted BP’s stock or alternatively sold off their shares in the company. And indeed, BP lost about half its value in market capitalization over the next few months. Why? If BP’s earning were solely contingent on the labour power it exploits, it’s likely that investors wouldn’t care much since the labour power lost in the explosion could be easily replaced (at least from a corporate though not human perspective). But earnings are contingent on a number of factors as noted above and as oil continued to gush for weeks on end, investors saw red.  Earnings would be jeopardized by countless lawsuits, corporate fines, clean-up costs and potentially greater premiums for insurance. 

A second illustrative example is armament firms.  My previous research in Carbon Capitalism considered how much the share price of major armament firms in the United States increased throughout the war on terror. The average return on the S&P 500 – a broad index that effectively measures the health of the United States economy – was 7 percent. The average return for the top 5 armament companies was 234 percent.  Why?  Because they were exploiting some of the highest paid, educated and privileged workers on the planet?  Surely not.  The astronomical rise in the share price of armament firms was a direct result of investors anticipating a long (perhaps never ending) war and war not only requires more state spending on arms, but evermore materiel. Bullets, bombs and military vehicles have to be replaced.    There’s really no need to go on further as the earnings and rising capitalization of these firms are clear to the naked eye.  Without a ‘war on terror’ or a credible threat of war, it is likely that the capitalization of these firms would have remained rather stagnant if not declined. 

With this specific contrast on the source of profit explored we can go a bit deeper into some of the main claims made in the capital as power approach. We might do well to list them in easy to understand steps:

  • The dominant subject of modern capitalism is the corporation and the largest corporations by market value/capitalization are called ‘dominant capital’.
  • While there are certainly family owned firms, most corporations are owned by absentee owners – owners that never actually work for the corporation. Corporations can also own shares in other corporations but ultimately ownership (if it were transparent) can be traced to individuals and families.
  • Those individuals and families that own the most claims to future income (e.g. stocks and bonds) can be considered ‘dominant owners’ or ‘the 1%’.
  • The ownership of shares in corporations represent claims on future income streams or corporate earnings. The state is also capitalized through its ‘national debt’. Government bonds in their various forms are a claim on a portion of state revenues collected as taxes, fines and fees.  
  • The firms with the largest market value/capitalization have greater power to shape the social process than their smaller peers. These firms are price makers rather than price takers.
  • The dominant ritual of modern capitalism is capitalization. Capitalization is the act of discounting to present value a future flow of income (also considering some factor of risk). In this sense, ‘capital’ is either money to be invested in an income-generating asset or money that will be invested in an income-generating asset. Capital is no material entity in the capital as power framework, but a symbolic magnitude measured in pecuniary units.
  • Discounting is done by investors because of the time value theory of money in finance. This theory holds that money invested today is worth more than it is tomorrow because we can start generating a return today. A simple example here may suffice for those unfamiliar with discounting.  You might pay $250 for shares in a company today that you anticipate will be worth $300 in a week’s time – a 20 percent return if things pan out. But you’d be a bit of a fool to pay $250 for shares in a company today for the same shares at $250 in a week’s time. Worse still, you’d never pay $250 for shares in a company today in return for the same share valued at $100 next week. In both cases, you’d be a pretty bad investor/capitalist.
  • Earnings are never a narrow offshoot of production but result from the control of production for profitable ends rooted in ownership. Earnings/profit are contingent on broad power processes not simply the exploitation of labour power as demonstrated above. Labour is of course important, but it is a cost to business, not the source of profit.   
  • Since earnings are a matter of corporate power, what investors capitalize when they purchase shares in corporations is ultimately the firm’s power to shape and reshape the social process in their favour. For example, the NRA protects gun manufactures in the United States through political donations, lobbying and advertising. If US legislators finally decide to ban handguns (though highly unlikely given the power of the manufacturers of hand guns), the earnings of the major manufacturers would plummet.
  • What this amounts to is that ‘capital’ is no material thing, but capitalized social power represented in capitalization or the value of ownership claims to future earnings measured in some unit of account (dollars, rand, rupees).

Now that we have some idea of the capital as power approach, how might it be mobilized to understand, explain and critique various aspects of African political economy?  My comments are not meant to be exhaustive and I must admit my work doesn’t look at any one specific African economy.

First, there is a historical dimension that could be explored.  More work could be done on how the European joint-stock corporations were involved in the African slave trade and early colonial projects.  It’s not just that slavery contributed to industrial capitalism as per Williams’ original argument, but that it actually was capitalism – at least in my view. These were capitalized firms in search of earnings on the backs of Africans. Also, slaves in America (likely the Caribbean too) were used as collateral for loans. If farmers/plantation owners couldn’t pay their creditors, slaves could be taken as valuable property. So, in reality – at least in the US – an entire financial system was erected on the slave economy.  Some questions in this vein might be: How far and in what ways was the capitalization and earnings of these early firms contingent on exploiting the African continent and to what effect? For instance, how did the profits of the Royal Africa Company empower English royalty and city of London merchants?  How did the desire to accumulate greater wealth by the company’s owners aggravate and extend the transatlantic slave trade? Another useful study might be how the stock exchanges of Africa were set up and the early ownership of these exchanges and the firms listed on them.  This would obviously be linked to the colonial and post-colonial period.  Another key concern might be to investigate how various African communities became de-monetized of their original currencies and how they were re-monetized with a colonial currency. Another issue would be the creation of the ‘national’ debts in Africa and who owns those debts? How were various forms of taxation introduced in order to force Africans into the labour market and how were these practices connected to increasing public debt and the corporate exploitation of resources? How has the institution of ownership developed in various African political economies and who had to be dispossessed to create it?  There are certainly additional questions to be investigated but research agendas querying the above would go a far way in illuminating the power of capital in Africa during its earlier years.

Second, there is a contemporary (and to a considerable extent, a future) dimension. A first question might investigate the ownership of publicly listed African firms. To what degree are they foreign owned? How concentrated is the ownership of the leading firms on African stock exchanges? How are they using their power to shape and reshape the terrain of social reproduction generally and public policy more specifically to generate differential earnings? Second, how do the major firms by capitalization on African exchanges relate to ongoing resource extraction and climate change? How are these resources being used and to what effect? Are everyday Africans benefiting from these resources or just a few national and international investors?  What firms represent Africa’s ‘dominant capital’ (leading companies by market capitalization – say top 25) and what sectors and geographies do they operate in?  How do they seek to shape public policy? How have and how do investors perceive the equity markets across Africa? And perhaps last, how far and in what ways has the capitalist mode of power been entrenched across the political economies of Africa and how has this exacerbated inequality and unequal life chances?

These are just some basic questions someone investigating Africa’s political economies might ask from the perspective of capital as power. Old traditions and perspectives still continue to have a stranglehold on political economy as a field.  And while they may yield insights of their own, I think the perspective of capital as power has its own unique insights to offer that are closer to the actual practices of capitalists than traditional theories. So if we want to change the world for the better and to be rid of social injustices, it might be a good idea to have a proper understanding of what is actually going on.         

Tim Di Muzio is Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Economy at the University of Wollongong in Australia. His latest book is The Tragedy of Human Development: A Genealogy of Capital as Power

Featured Photograph: Montage of the War on Terror.

Bibliography

Bracking, Sarah (2016) The Financialisation of Power. How Financiers Rule Africa. (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group).

Di Muzio, Tim (ed.) The Capitalist Mode of Power. (London: Routledge).

Di Muzio, Tim and Richard Robbins (2015) Debt as Power. (New York: Oxford University Press).

Di Muzio, Tim and Matt Dow (2017) ‘Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West’ Cambridge Review of International Affairs, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2016.1256949: 1-20.

Di Muzio, Tim (2017) The Tragedy of Human Development: A Genealogy of Capital as Power. (London: Rowman Littlefield).

Nitzan, Jonathan (1998) ‘Differential Accumulation: Toward a New Political Economy of Capital’. Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 2: 169-217.

Nitzan, Jonathan (2001) ‘Regimes of Differential Accumulation: Mergers, Stagflation and the Logic of Globalization’ Review of International Political Economy. 8:2: 226-274.

Nitzan, Jonathan, and Shimshon Bichler (2001) ‘Going Global: Differential Accumulation and the Great U-turn in South Africa and Israel’ Review of Radical Political Economics. 33: 21-55.

Nitzan, Jonathan and Shimshon Bichler (2002) The Global Political Economy of Israel. (London: Pluto Press).

Nitzan, Jonathan and Shimshon Bichler (2009). Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder. (London: Routledge).

Woodley, Daniel (2015). Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics. Sovereignty and State Power in a Multipolar World. (London and New York. Routledge).

 

Tax Avoidance and Evasion in Africa

By
ROAPE
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By Nataliya Mykhalchenko

Tax avoidance, tax evasion, tax heavens, illicit financial flows and global tax governance are real buzzwords that have come to dominate current international political and financial domains. Tax avoidance, understood as the use of the so-called ‘loopholes’ in the tax legislation to reduce one’s tax payments increasingly tops news charts. The recent EU’s blacklist of 17 tax havens, Paradise Papers and last year’s Panama Papers are among the starkest examples. Recent waves of tax dodging scandals including those of tax evasion – the use of unlawful means to escape paying tax – pushed many governments globally towards implementing various structural changes to taxation systems. Moreover, there is a growing call towards making the ‘fight’ against the exploitation of tax regulations ‘a global effort’ and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD), Tax Inspectors Without Borders and the Declaration on Automatic Exchange of Information are amongst the most prominent measures of this kind.

In a recent study that explored anti-fraud initiatives in nine countries on the African continent, measures to address the drainage of revenue featured strongly. What is particularly interesting is the fact that many actors, private, governmental and supranational, including those in the West, seem to be especially active in encouraging change and acting as ‘advisories’ to governments and business on the African continent. This blogpost will use the findings of the study to outline some of the interventions, paying particular attention to the actors involved. The blogpost will then look closer at the OECD’s initiative, and close with some questions and thoughts regarding the findings and the North-South dynamic that prevails.

According to one estimate, US$240bn is lost in tax revenue every year due to various forms of tax avoidance and evasion, with the majority of losses in low- and lower middle-income countries. As shortages in funding of developmental projects persist and countries struggle to meet the financial requirements needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (currently the investment gap in developing countries is around US$2.5 trillion), experts worldwide highlight that the tax loses are unjustifiable and if addressed, can be used to facilitate the delivery of the SDGs. In recent years, many initiatives emerged across the Global South to raise awareness of the problem, involving governments, supranational organisations such as EU, UNDP and OECD to name a few, businesses, and rights advocacy groups such as Tax Justice Network and others. Several countries in the Global South have been applauded for their efforts to keep up with the tax reform that prevails in parts of the Northern hemisphere.

Having looked at anti-fraud initiatives in South Africa, Ghana, Botswana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia several trends emerge, some of which were outlined in previous blogs on roape.net. One trend that has not been discussed is the nature of the initiatives aimed at tackling various forms of tax evasion and avoidance and importantly the actors that are driving these measures. The types of initiatives aimed at addressing tax loss, range, amongst others, from education-led awareness raising campaigns on the importance of tax contributions and the harm that tax evasion and avoidance has on the health of the economy, the use of automation and digital technologies to increase tax collections and to facilitate the transfer of information on local, national and global levels, amendments in the legislation, and intercountry cooperation. The actors involved include domestic and foreign governments, businesses (consultancies and banks in particular), supranational organisations, development agencies, and advocacy and civil society groups. To explore these measures further, a number of examples will be given below, paying special attention to the actors driving and implementing such initiatives.

Who is pushing for crackdowns on tax fraud?

Private businesses, especially consultancies and banks, are active advocates for lawful taxation contributions across the studied countries. For instance, Deloitte Consulting launched the Tip-Offs Anonymous Hotline both in Botswana and Malawi aimed at deterring financial fraud, including tax evasion and tax avoidance. According to the Managing Director of the Botswana Development Corporation, ‘Tip-Offs Anonymous line is put in place as a deterrent to fraud and promotes a culture of zero tolerance towards these crimes.’  In another initiative, Tallinn-based multinational company Nortal is assisting Botswana in creating a ‘new tax management solution’ which will replace the existing system entirely. Costing around €8 million, it will provide new risk management solutions and ‘should boost overall economic growth in Botswana, reduce the tax gap and increase transparency while reducing costs.’ PricewaterhouseCoopers Ghana while commenting on the Ghana’s new 2018 budget has advised the government to implement changes to strengthen revenue collection, including, among others, the use of mobile payment technology, targeting debt management, minimising the fiscal gap, and ‘increased investment in agriculture value chains and in growth enhancing infrastructure including radical structural transformation to ensure export diversification.’

Moreover, businesses are particularly active in initiating measures to address counterfeiting and substandard produce. It is important to note that counterfeiting, tax evasion and avoidance are closely interlinked. It is more difficult to obtain the legislated amount of tax from counterfeited and unlicensed products, and in addition it has a negative impact on those brands whose products are being replicated. International firms such as Southern Graphics Systems (SGS) operating in Kenya, Sproxil in Tanzania and Bureau Veritas in all of the studied countries, offer services to business and individuals, and cooperate with governmental agencies on strengthening quality checks and identify counterfeited produce. Technology is often adopted in these measures. An interesting example is that of collaboration between the Human Development Innovation Fund, UK’s Department for International Development and the firm Sproxil. The initiative involves the introduction of Mobile Product Authentication technology to help verify counterfeit produce in pharmaceuticals and educate individuals on health risks associated with such products.

National governments have featured strongly as those pushing for strengthening of the tax regulation, so all the nine studied countries contained a government-led initiative related to taxation. To highlight the variety and scale of these initiatives a few examples provides powerful illustration: declarations of crackdowns on tax misconduct by the country’s presidents in the case of Tanzania; registering taxpayers at the district level in an effort to address the problem at grass-roots level, and the adoption of Electronic Billing Machines in Rwanda; amendments to national legislation to specifically tackle tax-avoidance as in South Africa. More aggressive measures in Nigeria whose Federal Inland Revenue Service have threated to deny access to banking facilities for those companies that don’t join taxation register.

In Ghana, measures to combat tax evasion and avoidance are initiated by a number of actors, including the Ghana Investment Promotion Council with an initiative to develop a ‘beneficiary ownership regime’ aimed at identifying owners of companies, particularly in the extractives industries. In a more recent initiative, the Ghana Revenue Authority planned to use the Point of Sale (PoS) devices to strengthen tax collection and improve monitoring of revenue. There seems to be widespread support for this measure, including from Price Waterhouse Coopers Ghana. Kenya’s efforts focused on Small and Medium Enterprises, where the Kenya Revenue Authority seeks to address the issue at grassroots level and work closely with county authorities to integrate the SMEs into the taxation system. Malawi Revenue Authority keeps up with the trend of using technology, in particular electronic payment systems to encourage tax payers and prevent evasion and avoidance.  

Finally, Botswana focused on tackling tax avoidance by identifying ‘multinational tax dodgers’ and has joined OECD’s framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. According to a state official, ‘Botswana is […] obliged to conform to these standards and that may mean amendment of tax legislation where necessary.’ In the words of the same official, ‘Botswana’s tax system will be put under scrutiny whether it conforms to international best practice which should in turn boost investor confidence and hence it has the potential to attract investment by credible investors.’

The involvement of foreign actors, including governmental bodies is extensive across the studied countries. UK’s DFID has been particularly active in offering assistance, having spent over £32 million on tax system improvements overseas in 2015, and £26 million in 2016. Out of the 9 studied countries, seven (Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia) received assistance from the British government. For example, in 2015, Ghana and the HMRC partnered with the Ghana Revenue Authority to develop their expertise on tax legislation, compliance and data privacy. This agreement is part of a wider, OECD backed ‘global standard’ for an automatic exchange of information of tax payer’s data scheduled for 2018. According to International Development Secretary Justine Greening, ‘the UK is committed to helping developing countries get their tax systems in order so that as their economies grow they are able to increasingly fund their own health and education programmes and reduce aid dependence.’

Advocacy and civil society groups are actively gaining ground in running of campaigns to raise awareness on illicit financial flows. One of the widely known organisations is Tax Justice Network (TJN) which offers research, analysis and advocacy on tax evasion and avoidance, as well as The Global Tax Alliance for Tax Justice (a spin off from TJN), which brings together civil society organisations and activists working with this issue. Numerous regional organisations such as Tax Justice Network Africa, run national and grass roots level events. Among its initiatives is the Stop Bleeding Africa Campaign which joined various stakeholders in an attempt to drive one Africa-wide response. Numerous national organisations and civil-rights activists are promoting awareness as part of this initiative, for example the recent campaign in Ghana in collaboration with Ghanaian based Integrated Social Development Centre and Tax Justice Network. Numerous international charities also do extensive work organising initiatives and raising awareness on this issue, and include amongst others Transparency International, Action Aid, and Oxfam.

As was mentioned above, OECD has been an active player in introducing measures to address leakages of tax, and some argue, has been pivotal in the setting of certain international taxation standards. Tax Inspectors Without Borders, a joint initiative with UNPD launched in 2013 is aimed at providing technical assistance to developing countries to enhance their capacity to obtain tax contribution from multinational companies. Currently, technical assistance is being offered to 18 African states, in some cases partnered with actors such as UK’s HMRC, African Tax Administration Forum, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance, Netherlands’ Tax and Customs Administration, the World Bank Group, the French Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFiP), USAID and others.

What has come to be known as the ‘Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes’ was rolled out in the 2000s and includes 148 members, both OECD and non-OECD members. The Exchange of Information on Request, and most recently the Declaration on Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) have been the two core initiatives. These frameworks are now regarded as the new standard and currently over 100 countries have signed up to the declaration. The core idea is to allow for easier and timely transmission of financial information (gathered by financial institutions such as banks) about a country’s residents living overseas with the aim of greater transparency and prevention of tax evasion and avoidance, while suggesting that the existence of tax heavens may come to an end. The countries can sign multilateral (there are currently 98 signatories) or bilateral agreements, as we have seen between Ghana and the Netherlands. Countries are free to chose with which countries to exchange information.  

Are we on the right track?

The examples outlined above would suggest that various actors recognise the need to address illicit financial flows and implement different measures to raise awareness (even if driven by profit motives), and put in place mechanisms to prevent tax dodging and allow for greater transparency. However, what is critical to note is that a number of the actors involved in pushing for anti-tax evasion and avoidance, may themselves be culpable for similar abuses of the tax legislation. For example, Deloitte, and other accountancy firms such as PwC were acting as advisories and helped companies such as Blackstone avoid paying tax as we have seen in the Paradise Papers. Moreover, a group of consultancy firms that have become known as ‘the big four’, PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG, are known to use their positions to lobby for certain regulations and in some cases employees of these firms are known to take up roles at the OECD and in national governments to push for their client’s interests. Furthermore, numerous international banks were discovered to make use of tax heavens to hide their profits, such as Barclays which declared profits of €557m in Luxembourg but only paid €1m in tax.

These are just some of the examples, where the ‘advisories’, are in fact the ones making use of the loopholes in legislation, while at the same time offering advice to countries in the Global South on how to better manage their taxes (see on this phenomenon John Christensen’s analysis in David Whyte and Jörg Wiegratz’s book here). What is important to note there is that such ‘advice’ often informs policy and legislation within those countries and here, one cannot fail to notice the characteristically unequal North-South dynamic.

While OECD’s initiatives are, one might argue, an important step towards greater transparency, and have even been deemed as ‘revolutionary’, commentators are calling for scrutiny of some of the organisation’s measures. In the case of Tax Inspectors Without Borders – a joint OECD/UNDP initiative – following a review of its operation it was discovered that leadership for the three of its pilot projects in Rwanda, Ghana and Senegal originated from donor countries, which was against the original formulation of the initiative.

In terms of the AEOI (Automatic Exchange of Information) one of the main concerns is the need for reciprocity meaning that it is required for a country to be able to collect and send information if it is to receive information in return. The issue here is the lack of capacity, infrastructure and resources in some Southern countries to do this, thus this would automatically exclude them from participating in the framework at least in the immediate future. Moreover, even if a country matches reciprocity requirements, another concern within the framework is the fact that countries are able to choose with whom to exchange information and this has been compared to a dating game. For example, even if country X wants to receive information from country Y, they will only be able to do this if country Y approves. An example is the US, which is a major player on the taxation arena and a country where many tax heavens are safely hidden. The States has for a long time imposed automated exchange of information on countries where their citizens reside, without participating in turn and is refusing to take part in the AEOI.   

A final aspect to mention here is the fact that the framework is reliant on financial institutions to record and verify residency information of their customers in order to transfer the requested information to the correct country. The concern is that there are ways – for example, making an investment – to gain residency in certain countries, use that information to register in a bank but not reside and conduct financial transactions in the country in question. So, fraudsters may continue to evade and hide tax in other locations without risk of being unmasked.

In this blogpost I have summarised some of the initiatives to address tax evasion and avoidance by numerous actors on the African continent and draw attention to frameworks that are presented as ‘international standards.’ The initiatives vary in type, scale, and the actors involved. It also suggests that the initiatives are underpinned by various drivers, whether commercial, political or other. There is a degree of hypocrisy on the side of some ‘advising’ actors where they are directly involved in or are facilitating financial crime. OECD’s initiative, while potentially beneficial, has loopholes and seems to disadvantage Southern countries.

While a growing body of literature is currently emerging surrounding illicit financial flows, as well as around the nature of global tax governance as a whole, there is not enough evidence to suggest that the ‘global fight’ is indeed not a ‘global flight’ driven by certain powerful entities and interest groups to avoid paying tax. Given that the issue has universal significance and undermines the development of many countries in the Global South, more research (and campaigning) is needed in order to understand the nature of these initiatives, the forces behind them, and the unequal North-South dynamic that prevails.

Nataliya Mykhalchenko graduated from the University of Leeds in 2016 with a BA in International Development. She now works in London for a company that helps education, research, healthcare, non-profits and civil society institutions. Nataliya started researching anti-fraud initiatives on the African continent in 2015 as part of a funded five week Leeds University Summer Research Internship Scheme. In 2016, supported by ROAPE, she continued her research. To date she has looked at anti-fraud measures in South Africa, Ghana, Botswana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia. Nataliya’s research was linked to the ongoing work of ROAPE’s Jörg Wiegratz at the University of Leeds on the political economy of anti-fraud measures in the Global South.

Featured Photograph: HMRC offshore evasion poster February 2014.

Pan-African Panther

By
ROAPE
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By Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and LaKeyma Pennyamon

I. Black Panther

Black Panther is set in Wakanda, a fictional African country set somewhere near actual Uganda. The name ‘Black Panther’ is also a title given to the warrior that serves as the champion of the nation, a title held by the film’s protagonist T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), son of the recently assassinated King of Wakanda T’Chaka and heir to the throne. Wakanda is thought to be an impoverished Third World nation by the outside world but is secretly the most technologically advanced nation on earth, made possible by its virtual monopoly over a mysterious metal known as vibranium which powers its technologies.

Wakanda guards its vibranium – and the advanced science driven by it – behind a strictly patrolled and camouflaged border and an isolationist and non-interventionist foreign policy that helps maintain the secret of vibranium and prevent foreign powers from attempting to backward engineer its technologies and use them to gain global dominance over the rest of the world. Wakanda jealously guards its riches and many of its ancient cultural religious practices and political institutions behind its wall of camouflage. However, T’Challa’s uncle, Prince N’Jobu, betrays Wakanda’s secrets to a South African mercenary who later attempts to sell vibranium to the CIA. Prince N’Jobu is killed in the attempt to arrest him for his crimes, leaving behind an orphaned son N’Jadaka, who later adopts the moniker Eric Killmonger in recognition of his impressive record of kills in the US military. Killmonger returns to Wakanda to contest T’Challa for the throne and, more importantly, to contest Wakanda’s centuries long isolationist policy – demanding that Wakanda arm Black people worldwide to fight their oppressors, so that he can establish a global Wakandan Empire on which the ‘sun will never set.’

The tension between T’Challa as protector of Wakanda’s isolationist history and the larger Black world becomes part of the central conflict of the movie. Importantly, for both the movie and the soundtrack, Black people are the major players on both sides of the conflict; sometimes the sides clearly arrange themselves into moral right and wrong, while at other times the conflict seems more about perspective.

One of the many merits of the film is its reignition of interest and debate on the questions of African sovereignty versus African solidarity. The film itself steers debate toward the struggle between two ‘opposed’ views as represented by T’Challa/Black Panther and Killmonger. T’Challa and his family represent African sovereignty that is made possible only through self-protective isolationism. Killmonger, on the other hand, stands in for a kind of bellicose Black internationalism; he calls T’Challa’s isolationism ‘cowardly abandonment.’

Many think-pieces responding to Black Panther in the US have tried to map the ideological struggle in the film onto historical struggles in the US, such as ones between violent and non-violent resistance and Black nationalism vs. integrationist approaches to Black liberation. Besides the fact that Wakanda is a warrior-led nation, troubling the non-violence vs. violence framing of the movie’s conflict, the fact that Wakanda controls its national resources is a crucial and decisive context for the ideological conflict in Black Panther. It means that the outcome of the struggle between T’Challa and Killmonger will decide the political trajectory of an entire nation, not of an activist movement – that is, it will move armies, policies, and resources on a massive scale.

While the stakes in the film are not those of the Black movement in the United States, they do reflect the history of struggle between ideologies and political actors in many anti-colonial movements on the African continent and elsewhere in the diaspora.  For the continent, there is nothing hypothetical about the dangers posed by putting the wrong person in power, as the continent has had no shortage of real world Killmongers, some who participated in the anti-colonial struggle. The ideological conflict of the movie is less Malcolm X vs. Martin Luther King and more Nkrumah vs. Lumumba. The struggle in Black Panther is, first, over whether to have a Pan-Africanist orientation at all and second, over what the demands of a Pan-Africanist orientation would be.

Less explored by many of the think-pieces written in response to Black Panther is the Pan-Africanist stance embodied by Nakia, T’Challa’s love-interest. This is a shame: Nakia’s emphasis on genuine solidarity illustrate a politics which has served well the liberation efforts of Africans. Overlooking Nakia’s vision is also odd: after all, the film introduces us to our hero, T’Challa, through Nakia’s covert mission to infiltrate a group seemingly styled after Boko Haram and save their women captives. This mission fills out Nakia’s larger practical pan-Africanist vision, which is in fact the alternative to Killmonger’s global Wakandan empire of blood that T’Challa struggles to accept, though the movie’s final scenes show him ultimately taking timid steps towards this vision ed. It is Nakia and the Queen Mother who bridge the divide between the Jabari, Wakandan ethnic outcasts, and the rest of Wakanda. They discuss who to empower and why, with purpose and responsibility rather than rage and pride, which generally inform the decisions of the film’s more prominent male characters. Finally, Nakia is openly acknowledged as the savior of the country by T’Challa in one of the film’s important final moments.

II. Black Panther and Pan-African History

A review of the recent history of anti-colonial struggle shows clear parallels with the conflict in Black Panther. In 1945, World War II ended in defeat for the Axis powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. This cataclysmic global war shifted the global balance of power away from ravaged Europe. The new political reality presented opportunities. Africans felt the colonial grip loosen and got to work prying it off completely: most African nations gained formal independence within thirty years of the end of the second World War (and many within fifteen years). But it also presented opportunities for the new dominant global powers: the United States and the Soviet Union. International relations began to organize themselves around the diplomatic, political, and military arms races set-off by the Cold War.

As formerly colonized nations achieved formal independence, some national governments resisted this bi-polar trend. Through a series of meetings, declarations, and conferences in Indonesia,  Egypt and Zambia, a Non-Aligned Movement was formed of nations that wanted to remain neutral in the Cold War. This movement is the reason for the term ‘Third World’ – while today it is just a shorthand for ‘poor’ (or, euphemistically, ‘developing’), its original meaning was a political one – it differentiated non-aligned nations from nations aligned with the US (the First World or the Western bloc) and with the USSR (the Second World or the Eastern bloc). The Third World would eventually include much of Central and South America, as well as the majority of the African continent and much of Asia (with notable exceptions like China and North Korea). Together, these nations accounted for a majority of the world’s population, and the clear majority of the world’s poor people. Many figures often remembered for their radically liberatory politics, like Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, embraced the strategy and ethos of the non-aligned movement.

The principles agreed upon in the Non-Aligned Movement were about maintaining distance from immensely destructive global conflict: mutual non-interference and non-aggression, and non-participation in formal military alliances like NATO. While not quite as isolationist as Wakanda, the same basic ethos applied.

The principle of non-alignment was in tension with a more interventionist, cross-national political ethos that had developed in anti-colonial struggle. African nations had no problem ‘meddling’ in each others’ affairs to remove colonial forces from the continent. Freedom fighters of the Zimbabwean African Nationalist Union (ZANU) found refuge in Mozambique; Pan-Africanist and Pan-Arabist President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was a strong supporter of Algeria’s National Liberation Front, for example. While Algeria, after its independence in 1962, would serve as a training ground for freedom fighters from the continent’s other struggles. Finally, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa received aid of various kinds, from training to refuge, from outside its borders: whether from allies on the continent in Angola and Mozambique to allies in the Second World, including Cuba and notably the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC).

So, at least some countries, in some situations, aligned themselves with the continental struggle against colonialism. Debate about the costs and risks acceptable for these countries were a constant source of contention between political actors in this period, from states-people to activists, from governments to unions and political parties.

The struggle between Killmonger and T’Challa isn’t an exact parallel, but there are dramatic similarities.  Wakanda wanted to remain isolationist to preserve its technological advantage over bellicose countries, not as a strategy to manage a technological disadvantage. It also took isolationism to an extreme that the Non-Aligned Movement did not – aid, trade and diplomatic alliances were still options for Non-Aligned nations. But the basic contours of the conflict between Non-Aligned rule and interventionism mirrors the one between T’Challa and Nakia: between security for one’s people and responsibility to justice on a world scale.

III. Black Panther and Future of Pan-Africanism

It is precisely these questions which concerns Nakia as she urges T’Challa to participate more in Black global affairs. At the beginning of the film, Nakia is participating in small-scale mutual aid projects: hunting ivory poachers and human traffickers, yet she remains dissatisfied with the limited impact of her efforts. One woman can only do so much. By the end of the movie, T’Challa is moved enough by Nakia’s influence – and elements of Killmonger’s criticism of Wakanda’s isolation – to invest in large-scale improvement projects in Oakland, California, which signals his readiness to engage with the world. Wakandan engagement with the world moves from small-scale, individual covert operations to large-scale, state-backed ‘outreach.’ However, in the film’s conclusion the initiator of these ventures shifts from Nakia to T’Challa.

At the end of the movie, T’Challa seemingly coopts and dilutes Nakia’s more radical vision of what mutual assistance could be, in revealing his plan for Wakandan outreach centres whose functioning and organization remain unclear. Moreover, mere outreach, however large the scale, is not enough. In order to effectively relate to Black populations, it had previously hidden itself from, Wakanda will need to engage in the multi-scale efforts to liberate Black peoples.

In the real world, aspects of Pan-Africanist internationalism created or invigorated by anti-colonial struggle remain. At the level of national and international government, there are already multinational institutions set-up for the purpose of facilitating cooperation between African-descended peoples across borders: from regional institutions like ECOWAS, CARICOM, and SADC to larger bodies like the African Union (formerly OAU). Some of these are even pursuing politically promising initiatives: the creation of an all-African Union passport and the renewed call for global reparations (to African descended and indigenous peoples) justice spearheaded by CARICOM and a UN Working Group.

But, like T’Challa’s vision, these efforts are not yet enough, and the stakes are quickening. As the effects of climate change worsen, it will be the Third World that bears the brunt of the costs and burdens, from literal destruction due to rising sea levels to a continued disproportionate burden to take in the world’s climate refugees. Any serious Pan-Africanism will need to do more than get actors that look like us in films (even ones as great as Black Panther) – there will need to be a serious, structural, and permanent alteration to the distribution of resources and political power on a world scale.

Outside of the Marvel universe, pan-Africanist struggle will need to operate on all scales of politics. Nakia-style interventions into hot zones of conflict will continue to be necessary. But we will also need to contest structural aspects of the global political order head on: the current function of multinational institutions like the World Bank, IMF, development banks, to finance desperately needed infrastructure projects and manage the dangerous and exploitative effects of international finance. We will need to advocate for reparations at a global level, and to organize support for land redistribution programs broadly, including the one proposed in South Africa to redistribute land currently owned by white South Africans to poor Black South Africans. We must expect and act to anticipate and counter the effects of violent First World opposition to both, in the event that there’s an attempt at follow through.

At lower institutional levels, concerted groups of individuals can create durable links of transfer of material and epistemic resources between institutions like universities, laboratories, and other institutions in the First and Third World. This would ensure that at least some of the vast research, political infrastructure, and other resources made possible in the final analysis by wealth accumulated in the first world returns to the hands and control of indigenous and African descended peoples – as co-owners, not as objects of study. T’Challa wasn’t entirely off the mark with the job he entrusted to Princess Shuri.

Finally, either the African Union, or another suitable multinational body, should expand to include the African diaspora outside of the continent itself, including nations of primarily African-descended peoples in the Caribbean and South America, or there should again be a global alliance of indigenous and other colonized peoples on the scale of the one represented by the Non-Aligned Movement. Activists and organizers should likewise cultivate personal relationships to groups in the Third World – not token ties for the sake of providing PR cover for their ‘hot takes’, but substantive alliances laying the groundwork for revolutionary intercommunalist struggle.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a PhD candidate at UCLA. His research focuses on ethical and political theory, anti-colonial thought, and the Black radical tradition. (Chelsey) LaKeyma Pennyamon is an undergraduate philosophy major at Morgan State University. Her interests include political aesthetics, Black radical traditions, and poetry. 

Featured Photograph: Black Power Demonstration in London (August, 1970)

Cape Town Water Musings: the Politics of Environmental Crisis and Social Inequality

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By Heike Becker

Cape Town has been facing a severe and aggravating water crisis for the past year. Currently legal impositions by the city government restrict Capetonians to a maximum of 50 litres per day domestic water consumption. In late January 12 April was announced to be a probable ‘Day Zero’ when most household water taps were to be cut off, and residents would have to queue at 200 points across the city of four million to collect a daily allocation of 25 litres per person. This would make Cape Town the first major city to face dry taps. After an amount of agricultural dam water was redirected into the city’s dams and according to the municipality domestic water consumption has been halved over the past few months, the date when the taps might be cut off has been pushed back several times, and now stands officially at 9 July. While ‘Day Zero’ has thus been turned from a probability into a possibility and may be avoided if the winter rains arrive reasonably early, a ‘national disaster’ has been declared as a result of the drought. This means that the national government, now under new South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, will be responsible for delivering relief unlike earlier when the situation had the status as a regional Western Cape issue.

The reasons for the disastrous situation have been widely debated. First and foremost the grim drought has been due to a global environmental crisis. Clearly, over the past three years Cape Town’s winter rains have been sparse, only amounting to about one third of what the Western Cape usually receives during the expected heavy downpours between June and September. Most commentators, engineers and environmentalists agree that this is connected to the effects of global warming, with Southern Africa in general, and its coastal regions in particular being among the worst affected.  Secondly, it seems equally clear that there has been a long-time mismanagement of Cape Town’s water provisions. Warnings that the city may run out of water within the near future were raised as early as 1990, yet little additional technical solutions were developed to complement a decaying system of ancient dams located in the winter rain catchment areas. Political blame needs to be laid squarely at the feet of both the former ANC and the current opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) run city governments. Only now during this pressing crisis are expensive and relatively small desalination plants being completed that may, or may not, provide the much-needed additional water resources.

The Cape Town water crisis is arguably caused by both global environmental politics and local mismanagement. It is also a matter of social inequality in neoliberal post-apartheid South Africa. People respond to the crisis with a baggage of past and present experiences in a city as painfully unequal as Cape Town, complete with its violent history of social and spatial division – before and after 1990. Some among the city’s affluent minority have hailed the adjustments and moved to an eco-friendly lifestyle, enforced by the current crisis and its accompanying doomsday panic. This eco-friendly frenzy among the privileged minority has had little resonance among those of the majority to whom an abundance of clean potable water flowing from a private tap has always been a far-off dream. 

The suspicion of each other, feeding on the very real experiences of life may even prevent much-needed changes towards a more sustainable resource usage. The following poignant personal observations were written at the time of the rising ‘Day Zero’ panic at the end of January 2018.

Cape Town Doomsday Jitters

I had been away from the city for six weeks. When I returned on a flight packed with German tourists it was the height of summer.  On the approach to Cape Town the cheerful pilot promised comfortable summer temperatures and wished the airline’s ‘guests’ (what happened to ‘passengers’?) a wonderful stay. Looking into the sun-starved Northern European faces I wondered whether any of those coming to enjoy a holiday in the sun had heard of the drought that held the city in its grip. After all, Cape Town’s water shortages had even made it to the mid-morning programme of the local Berlin radio station I had been listening to in my small kitchen in the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood of the city.

My fellow passengers seemed not to notice the water-wise banner displayed prominently in the terminal, nor the announcements in the baggage hall that greeted the visitors with the message that Cape Town was at the moment experiencing a severe drought and asked the visitors to help save water.  The male voice from the airport’s sound system sounded cheerful and serene, and wished those arriving for the overseas tourism season that they should ‘enjoy their stay.’

A photograph of a poster issued by the Western Cape government in 2017 calling for people to conserve water (19 May, 2017).

Little had the arrival prepared me for the shock I experienced over the next few days. Colleagues at the university and almost everyone else I spoke with seemed to have only one topic, the impending ‘Day Zero’ when in just over two months the taps would run dry. The City had just announced that from 1 February residents were only permitted a daily 50 litres of municipal water consumption. Newspaper articles and the municipality’s spokesperson were not particularly clear as to what exactly was going to happen when from mid-April water was only going to be available from 200 collection points across the city. How they would provide for the city’s four million people in this way no one said. How one was expected to carry the daily allowance of 25 litres of water no one said. How people were supposed to carry on with their life and work if they had to spend long hours queuing for water collection again no one said. Few people even asked such questions.  

Instead people spoke about what they did to save water in ways that rose to a decidedly hysterical collective (and individual) mood. I began to feel it in my bones, and a few days after my return I, too, began to stockpile water from the supermarket in 5 litre plastic containers, something I had never before considered. But now I couldn’t escape the daily rising hysteria. Articles on various websites and the updates on Facebook friends’ timelines triggered a rising fear of the unknown, the impending disaster they suggested. The party was over in parched Cape Town one widely shared article foretold. The most worrying pieces had been penned by some friends who posted long write-ups about water-saving tips.  The days of practical reminders to shower briefly and flush the toilet less frequently were long gone. More peculiar personal behaviours now took the top slot. One Facebook friend elaborated on how she had started urinating into yoghurt containers and emptying them into the garden, another announced with a peculiar sense of pride that ‘gone are the days of luxurious bath towels’, which she had replaced with smaller, thinner towels to save on laundry space. Someone declared with palpable pride that she had ‘mothballed’ the washing machine and how when going out she carried bottled water to public places to save on municipal water for hand washing. A colleague from the humanities faculty posted that she had stopped taking her vitamin supplements to avoid her urine taking on an intense yellow tint, which she thought might be offensive in the unflushed university toilets. Several women used public online forums to contemplate in an entirely serious tone cutting their hair short in order to save water by not have to wash their hair. Others boasted how long it had been since they had last washed their hair. Or how they had changed their meals, having taken pasta completely off the menu and replaced it with water-neutral food.

Coming home with another 5 litres of bottled water, I made a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table and thought about these posts. They were, I felt, highly disturbing. Not only did they add to the sense of impending disaster and the pungent hysteria gripping the city, they make me feel threatened in unprecedented ways. After all, for almost a decade I had lived in Namibia where drought and water restrictions were a normal part of life. These posts were pretending to share water saving best practices, and they made me feel exceptionally queasy. It was not only that some suggestions were rather eccentric, it was the tone of these messages that produced unease. The tone suggested that those who posted them were at the forefront of the battles to save the city from the ravages of climate change, incompetent politicians and their fellow residents who lack public spirit. They were the vanguard warriors, or amazons to be precise since they were all women – white women. White women of the educated middle classes, who, as good conscientious lefties paid a nod or two to those of the city’s majority who had never had the luxury of water flowing from a private tap in their home, and who had never had access to more than twenty litres of water a day. Yet the manner in which they presented their new practices left me feeling deeply uneasy; the way in which they wore their oily hair and dry toilet practices as badges of honour seemed to suggest a holier-than-thou attitude.

The students of the mostly black, mostly working-class university where I teach certainly did not have much understanding for the white middle-class women whose newest campaign seems to promote dry toilet practices, who publicise their pee-in-the-yoghurt container, dirty linen and oily hair, I thought. As students returned for the new academic year, and when challenged about such practices some plainly laughed it off. Crisis, what crisis? The water taps are still open! To them the water saving practices propagated on those water amazons’ Facebook timelines are just another white foible, like veganism, or driving small cars of ancient build.

How far we continue to be removed from each other, I thought as I took the empty mug to the sink for a minimal water-saving rinse. How awfully the terrible crisis that has engulfed the city shows up, once again, South Africa’s deep cracks, how insurmountable are its ridges and divides.

Heike Becker is a regular contributor to the www.roape.net. As a writer and scholar. she directs research and teaching on multiculturalism and diversity as Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

Tsvangirai’s Greatest Moment

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ROAPE
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After the death of Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, we republish an article from our archive.  Writing in 2000 Peter Alexander describes the election that almost toppled Mugabe’s ZANU-PF (Vol. 27, No. 85). Arguably this was the pinnacle of Tsvangirai’s career. He rose to prominence in Zimbabwe as a grassroots trade union leader who went on to head the powerful union federation, the ZCTU, and eventually became Zimbabwe’s most prominent opposition politician.

In this fascinating account from 2000, Peter Alexander wrote about the first time since independence in 1980, that the country’s then president, Robert Mugabe, faced a serious opposition movement. In the elections, held in June 2000, the worker-backed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won 57 out of 120 elected seats, with Mugabe’s party, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) securing 62. The MDC’s success included all 27 contests in the three most populous urban areas (Harare, Bulawayo and Chitungwiza), and all the fully urbanised constituencies in the next six largest centres.

Alexander argued that there could be little doubt that, had the election been free and fair, the MDC would have won more constituencies than ZANU-PF in 2000. Since the party had only existed for 16 months, this was a remarkable achievement. The article concluded that in 2002, when Zimbabwe was due to hold its presidential election, the MDC’s leader would have been well placed to mount a victorious campaign. Tragically that did not happen; the MDC followed a different course.

 

Zimbabwean Workers, the MDC & the 2000 Election

By Peter Alexander

 

To read the full article click here

Capitalism, Change and Fraud in Uganda

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By Yusuf Serunkuma Kajura

Jörg Wiegratz, Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-Cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda (New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)

At the core of this book is the question: What explains the prevalence of fraud in contemporary capitalist societies? This question seeks to respond not to a single event but to a “socio-cultural” shift. The author’s question is based on the observation that fraud (theft, corruption, trickery etc.) has become wide spread in contemporary capitalist societies in most businesses and other forms of interactions. In Uganda it is has spread to that point that artistes and dramatists use the subject of fraud in their creative work highlighting its rather normalized status. The claim in the book is that there has been a major shift as the condition seems rather new.

Wiegratz juxtaposes two moments in Ugandan business history. The period before the World Bank and IMF enforced structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), and the period after the SAPs were introduced, which also occurred at the same time as the government of President Museveni and his National Resistance Movement (NRM) came to power. Interested in providing empirical data in the study on neoliberal moral economies, Wiegratz conducted fieldwork in Uganda’s Bugisu region in the east and Kampala, and focuses on coffee and cotton farming and trading. In these areas, the author held several interviews and reviewed newspaper reports and carried out ethnography.

The business environment, he argues, before the SAPs was characterised by cooperative unions, which provided among other things, price regulation, credit facilities, produce transportation, and warehousing, to farmers. Wiegratz focuses on Eastern Uganda’s Bugisu Cooperative Union (BCU), which, out of 41 others, is the only one still standing in the post-SAPs period.  SAPs had been pitched to African economies (and other formerly colonised countries) as liberalising and freeing the market from undue regulations by government/cooperatives, which had been deemed as constraining the free flow of the market forces of demand and supply. Without seeking to idealise the period before SAPs, Wiegratz – based on interview findings – notes that business dealings then were defined and shaped by ‘notions of friendliness (sometimes feelings of affection for one another) mutual respect and trust, diligence, patience, honesty and discipline (e.g. not to give in to the temptations of harm and disappoint another close person by lying, stealing or breaking promises) and other related notions of good manners’ (p. 187). The people often saw themselves as connected to one another and doing business meant enhancing their collective livelihoods. Wiegratz continues that ‘trade was supported and enforced by a local community in which social interaction were taking place between people who generally knew each other and their families…who needed each other to sustain their livelihood.’ Although the author struggles to explain the genealogy of this moral locus – an issue to which I will return below – the sections narrating the radical shift in norms that happens after structural adjustment are brutally lucid (and many cases incriminating of the NRM government).

To explain these changes in norms and values, the author points at two centres of power, which seamlessly reinforced each other: The World Bank and the NRM leadership. If the World Bank was simply criminal in its actions, the NRM leadership took SAPs to an entire new level as they sought to materially benefit from the processes of restructuring themselves. Page after page, the author narrates how the NRM elite, took their cue from the World Bank and presided over corruption and theft that continues today. Firstly, to make the argument that cooperatives were unsustainable, the World Bank had to forge the evidence. Wiegratz cites a state official, ‘Cooperatives were forced to sell their business to the private sector’ through manufactured bank statements that declared them indebted and unsustainable. To do this, ‘accountants were sent into cooperatives to check their books. In the end the accountants made sure the cooperatives were on a loss on paper: cooperatives were told, you have to sell to cancel your debt [that was created on paper in the first place]. Also cooperatives were not regarded credit worthy by respective banks’ (p 99).

Starting with this incidence of criminality by the World Bank, the NRM leadership, fresh from the struggle in the bush, saw an opportunity to enrich themselves by sharing the resources of these cooperatives as well as state assets generally – directly free of charge, through proxies, fake Indian/foreign investors, and through privatisation and the Private Public Partnerships (PPPs). As Wiegratz writes:

Uganda’s privatisation was riddled with corruption, crime, trickery and self-enrichment schemes of political elites and their business allies. It involved a range of irregularities and trickeries: selling public entities at an undervalued price to cronies of the government, misdeeds regarding payment (for instance, no, incomplete or late payment) or bank asset manipulations. Many factories were acquired by connected people and they quickly resold them to make a substantial cut in the process…privatisation aided the process of a number of key NRM leaders becoming (large-scale) capitalists rather than sustained revolutionaries (pp.101-102).

Wiegratz notes that in addition to often well-publicised scandals of theft and egregious corruption at the top, people at the bottom learned that all that mattered was their self-interest, which they had to meet by any means necessary –  including violence. In an imagery of a rotting fish—which often starts to rot from the head, Wiegratz notes that a key shift in norms and values occurred. The corruption-ridden privatisation, the author notes, ‘helped to reframe and normalise deceiving and thieving’ (p. 103). But privatisation did not only benefit the rich, something else happened. The coffee industry for example, opened-up to more opportunistic deals than could ever have been imagined. More and more opportunistic ‘entrepreneurs’ joined the business to cash in. They had no concern for quality or already established business practices. Instead, they harvested unripe beans, added stones into the beans and even participated in outright theft. Economic liberalisation condemned farmers to the mercy of merchants and middlemen who were mostly ruthless and remorseless. 

The author also tells the story of a European company that he calls K, which, benefiting from support of powerful members of the government (who would deploy the security services in case of any protests), turned coffee-farming and trading in Eastern Uganda (Bugisu region) into a sort of Machiavellian colonialist business arrangement. Through several dubious means (including cheating, deceiving, inventing ‘quality’ issues etc., as they bragged about liberalisation and free markets), the company creamed off profits from Ugandan coffee farmers with reckless abandon! Wiegratz terms this phase as one where neo-liberal reforms became the ‘weapons of the powerful’ to exploit and impoverish the weak. As society’s leaders publicly bragged about their wealth despite having acquired it fraudulently, socio-cultural reprogramming took place as people came to believe that ‘the best way to live your life and be successful: be egoistic, with low other-regard and dishonest’ (p. 107). A quote from a social scientist the author spoke to summarises the conditions on the ground:

Uganda is about shamelessness and cheating nowadays. But remember a child learns from the father: if you steal while carrying your child on the back, your child thinks stealing is no problem. In the population theft is now seen to be normal. The leadership is not accountable; it is not punished for wrongdoing. Corrupt politicians are censored but then reappointed. Those who engage in corruption are protected [by the leadership]. The leadership promotes corruption and stealing; so people will say ‘why [should we] not also start stealing (p. 102).

However, Wiegratz is able to reveal that the shift in norms and values was not simply a product of SAPs, but a function of the people in power. At several points in the text, one is struck by the possibility that if another group of people had been in office, the story would be different. For example, in the case of the BCU’s struggle to recover its former glory and fight the excesses of neoliberalism, the government conducted a witch-hunt of the BCU leadership under Nathan Nandala Mafabi, who had implemented fruitful reforms to revive the cooperative, demonstrating the responsibility of the people in power for the continuation of the economic and political crisis hampering small producers and thus the reproduction of the neoliberal moral economy of the coffee trade dominated by local middlemen and foreign companies. Instead of focusing on pro-poor reforms, i.e. help revive the vitality of the cooperative (which would endanger the position of foreign buyers like K), the government viewed Mafabi (who has been a leading national opposition figure for years) as a threat to their power and thus suspended his leadership plunging the cooperative into further chaos.

However, it is the theoretical foundations of this book where the author flounders. We are confronted with two key conceptual questions. The first relates to the genealogical roots of morality (selfless, honest and pro-social values in business) and the second relates to whether neoliberalism/capitalism has any moral underpinnings. In some sort of enlightenment discourse, Wiegratz notes that neoliberal reforms were about ‘freeing or disentangling the actors and arenas of social interaction from established (traditional) moral norms and connotations, imposing a single rationality – self-interest, profit maximisation, efficiency -and making the self-interest principle the overriding or hegemonic moral code in the economy’ (p. 37). He then continues that ‘a core pillar of the moral code of the neoliberal doctrine is: maximise your own self-interest (utility) in every situation and you will maximise social welfare…do not in principal consider pro-social moral obligations, or other-than-gain imperative. Your moral obligation is gain maximisation’ (p. 38). Firstly, Wiegratz does little to explain the genealogy of morals. Why do people act fairly to each other? Where does the yearning for fairness come from? The author does not engage in a Nietzschean theorisation of “good” and “bad,” which might have told us that morality is a function of power and thus a form of violence itself, after all these terms often seek to protect specific interests. [Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals argues that the common sense we attach to notions such as “evil” “good” and “bad” have a specific history of power behind them, and what constitutes “good” or “bad” tended to shift depending on the time, and actors and interests behind the naming]. If the author had done this, then we would have reached a point where neoliberalism is believed to produce its own morality and thereby judge it on its own terms. Instead, we are left to read and judge neoliberal reforms through terms such as “pro-social,” “emotion-less,” or “emotion-full” “friendly,” and “honest” which seem to belong to an entirely different moral history or tradition. Even when the author seems to read from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which would be more appropriate to his moral-economy project, as Smith claims an innate natural inclination towards fairness common in human beings, the treatment is rather superficial and secondary. One would then think that Wiegratz has an alternative genealogy, which however remains unsaid.  Secondly, I am not convinced that capitalism produces its own morality in the definitions that Wiegratz offers above. Interestingly, Wiegratz concludes that morality and neoliberalism cannot co-exist. He writes:

for an economic actor to operate, in part at least on the basis of other-regard, empathy, fairness and honesty, or to build trust and long-term relationships requires stepping out of the neo-liberal conceptual and ontological realm and engage with or commit to other NVOPs [norms, values, orientations, and practices]. This entails a different agency, reflexivity and action logic that is beyond the neoliberal model. It is difficult to imagine how such NVOPs could be incorporated into the neoliberal actor model without analytical and practical tensions, and neo-liberal reform losing its distinct imperative and character (p. 48).

This section introduces us to the author’s view of a difficult marriage between morals and neoliberalism, which he characterises as ‘difficult to imagine’ –  a mild way of saying impossible. Besides these theoretical gripes, this book is extensive on the violence that structural adjustment and selfish politicians have meted out on African peasant communities as they forced them into fully-fledged market economies that they were unsuited to.

SAPs helped undermine cooperatives across Africa (while cooperatives remained active in Western Europe and North America!), advancing a brutal wave of re-colonialization of the continent. On the downside, the book is rather repetitive. In several cases, the author makes a single point in many paragraphs, using too many examples. This could read like an attempt to give the point more backing, but sometimes feels like some sort of uncertainty on the part of the author. It also can make reading the book tiresome. The book would also have benefited from a decent editor, who could also have checked local facts and spelling as certain names of places and persons were mixed up.

Yusuf Serunkuma Kajura is a graduate candidate at Makerere University Institute of Social Research (MISR) and a 2015 African Studies Association Presidential Fellow. Yusuf has a Bachelor’s degree in Literature and English Language and an MPhil in Social Studies [Cultural Studies] both from Makerere University. In his free time, Yusuf moonlights as a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, and as a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers and it was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.

Featured Photograph: Billboard of a campaign to prevent corruption in Nouakchott (Mauritania) in 2007.

Realities on the Ground: David Harvey replies to John Smith

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By David Harvey

John Smith is lost in the desert and dying for water. His trusty GPS system tells him there is fresh water ten miles to the East. Since he believes ‘for East to West’ one should ‘read South to North,’ he heads off to the South never to be seen again. This is alas the quality of the argument he makes against me. 

The East whereof I speak when I comment that wealth has moved from West to East in recent times, is constituted by China, now the second largest economy in the world (if Europe is not considered as one economy) followed by Japan as the third largest economy. Add in South Korea, Taiwan and (with a bit of geographical license) Singapore and you have a power block in the global economy (once referred to as the ‘flying geese’ model of capitalist development) that now accounts for roughly a third of total global GDP (compared to North America that now accounts for just over a quarter).  If we look back at the world as it was ordered in, say, 1960, then the astonishing rise of East Asia as a power center of global capital accumulation will be blindingly obvious.

The Chinese and the Japanese now own large chunks of a spiraling US government debt. There has also been an interesting sequence of each national economy in East Asia taking its turn in searching out a spatial fix for the massive amounts of surplus capital being accumulated within their borders.  Japan began capital export in the late 1960s, South Korea in the late 1970s, Taiwan in the early 1980s.  A lot of that investment went to North America and Europe.  

Now it is China’s turn.  A map of Chinese foreign investment in 2000 was almost totally empty.  Now a flood of it is passing not only along the ‘One Belt One Road’ through Central Asia into Europe, but also throughout East Africa in particular and into Latin America (Ecuador has more than half its foreign direct investment from China).  When China invited leaders from around the world to attend a One Belt One Road conference in May of 2017, more than forty world leaders came to listen to President Xi enunciate what many there saw as the initiation of a new world order in which China would be a (if not the) hegemonic power.  Does this mean China is the new imperialist power?

There are interesting micro-features to this scenario.  When we read accounts of awful super-exploitative conditions in manufacturing in the global South it often transpires that it is Taiwanese or South Korean firms that are involved even as the final product finds its way to Europe or the United States.  Chinese thirst for minerals and agricultural commodities (soy beans in particular) means that Chinese firms are also at the center of an extractivism that is wrecking the landscape all around the world (look at Latin America).  A cursory look at land grabs all across Africa shows Chinese companies and wealth funds are way ahead of everyone else in their acquisitions. The two largest mineral companies operating in Zambia’s copper belt are Indian and Chinese.

So, what does the fixed, rigid theory of imperialism to which John Smith appeals have to say about all of this?

According to John Smith I failed to take up the question of imperialism in The Limits to Capital.  I mentioned it only once, he says.  The index records some 24 mentions and the last chapter is entitled “the dialectics of imperialism.” It is perfectly true that I there found the traditional conception of imperialism derived from Lenin (and subsequently set in stone by the likes of John Smith) inadequate to describe the complex spatial, interterritorial and place-specific forms of production, realization and distribution that were going on around the world.

In this I was later intrigued to find a fellow spirit in Giovanni Arrighi who in The Geometry of Imperialism (written around the same time) abandons the concept of imperialism (or for that matter the rigid geography of core and periphery set out in world systems theory) in favor of a more open and fluid analysis of shifting hegemonies within the world system.  Neither of us deny that value produced in one place ends up being appropriated somewhere else and there is a degree of viciousness in all of this that is appalling.  This is, however, the process (and I emphasize the significance of ‘process’) we endeavor to chart, to uncover and to theorize as best we could. Marx taught us that the historical materialist method does not start with concepts and then imposes them on reality, but with the realities on the ground in order to discover the abstract concepts adequate to their situation.  To start with concepts, as does John Smith, is to engage in rank idealism.

So, on the basis of what is happening on the ground, I prefer to work with a theory of uneven geographical development, proliferating and differentiating divisions of labour, an understanding of global commodity chains and spatial fixes, of place production (urbanization in particular – a vital topic of which John Smith is oblivious) and the construction and destruction of regional economies within which a certain ‘structural coherence’ (or ‘regional value regime’) might form for a time, until powerful forces of devaluation and of accumulation through dispossession set in motion the forces of creative destruction. These forces affect not only what is happening in the global South but also in the deindustrializing North.

I try to look at this carefully through the prism of the differential geographical mobilities of capital, labour, money and finance and to look at the rising power of rentiers and the shifting power balance between various faction of capital (e.g. between production and finance) as well as between capital and labour. This is what I substitute for the crude and rigid theory of imperialism that John Smith espouses. It does not deny the immense accumulation of money power taking place within the hands of a few corporations and a few wealthy families or the dreadful conditions of life to which much of the world’s population is reduced.  But it does not imagine that the working classes of Ohio and Pennsylvania are living in the lap of luxury either. It acknowledges the significance of Marx’s theory of relative surplus value which makes it possible for the physical standard of living of labour to rise significantly even as the rate of exploitation increases to dramatic levels impossible to achieve through the absolute surplus value gained in the more impoverished arenas of capital accumulation that often dominate in the global South.  Furthermore, as Marx long ago pointed out, geographical transfers of wealth from one part of the world to another do not benefit a whole country; they are invariably concentrated in the hands of privileged classes. In recent times in the United States the Wall-Streeters and their hangers-on have done splendidly while the erstwhile workers of Michigan and Ohio have done very badly. 

Let us look backwards on all of this.  In the 1960s privileged sectors of the working class were largely protected within the boundaries of their nation states in the global North and could strive for political power within their space. They achieved welfare states through tactics of social democracy and received some of the benefits that came from rising productivity.  The capitalist counter was to try to weaken that power and bring wages down by encouraging immigration. The Germans looked to Turkey, the French to the Maghreb, the Swedes to Yugoslavia, the British to its erstwhile colonies and the US reformed its immigration laws in 1965 to open to the whole world. John Smith forgets that this was all subsidized by the capitalist state at the behest of the capitalist class. But that solution did not work.  So, from the 1970s onwards some (but by no means all) capital went to where the labour forces were cheapest. But globalization could not work without reducing barriers to commodity exchange and money flows and the latter meant opening a Pandora’s box for finance capital that had long been frustrated by national regulation. The long-term effect was to reduce the power and privilege of working class movements in the global north precisely by putting them into competitive range of a global labour force that could be had at almost any price.  I stand by the claim that the working classes within the global structure of contemporary capitalism are far more competitive with each other now than they were in the 1960s.

At the same time, technological change has been making labour less important in many spheres of economic activity (e.g. Google and Facebook).  While new structures connecting the intellectual and organizational labour of the global north with the manual labour of the global south have by-passed traditional working-class power in the global north leaving behind a desolate landscape of deindustrialization and unemployment to be exploited by whatever other means possible.

One final comment that typifies the kind of polemic that Smith engages in as a substitute for reasoned critique.  He mocks at the way I supposedly ‘pine for‘ a return to ’a more benevolent New Deal imperialism’  in The New Imperialism.  The context shows that I was saying this was the only possible path within a capitalist mode of production.  At that time (2003) it was clear that there was no global working-class movement that was remotely able to define an alternative to capitalism and that capitalism was headed for a nasty shock of the sort that occurred in 2007-8 (yes, I clearly predicted the likelihood of that in The New Imperialism in 2003). Given that the subsequent predictable crisis was resolved by further dispossessing whole populations of much of their wealth and asset values, then I think it would have been better for the left then to support a Keynesian alternative (which was, incidentally, later implemented by China).

This was, in my political judgment at that time, the only way that a breathing space could be created for the left to offset the drift, at that time clearly laid out by the neoconservative movement, for a violent militaristic and super-exploitative solution that echoed what happened in the lead-up to World War 2. I think in retrospect I was right in this even though I recognize that many will disagree with me.  This dilemma is, alas, still with us.  But reasoned critique is one thing and needlessly mocking polemics is another.

David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Featured Photograph: David Harvey speaking on Subversive Festival 2013 in Zagreb.

Delinking the Global South: Structural Transformation in Africa

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By Arndt Hopfmann

If, indeed, the question: “How to get out of capitalism and go beyond it remains the central question for the Russians, the Chinese, and all the other peoples of the world”, as Samir Amin wrote in 2016, describes the current fundamental challenge of development and social change worldwide, the inspirations to an answer without any doubts can be traced back to the Great Russian Revolution in 1917.

Some historical reminiscences and deliberations on the geo-political consequences of the emergence of the Soviet Union and later the Socialist Camp has been subject of my two-part Debate piece The Russian Revolution and a Myriad of Global Cleavages, published in the Review of African Political Economy. But the legacy of the Russian Revolution is not limited to a global bi-polar political dispensation. There are also lessons on the political economy of development and in particular on industrialization policies to be learnt.

The phenomenal rise of post-war Russia from a backward predominantly agrarian country by the way of forceful industrialization in only two decades to achieve a global super-power position made it the lodestar on the firmament of all those who struggled for national independence and aimed at the industrialization of their young Nation-States. But beside some positive exceptions mainly in Asia (India and China) and Latin America (Brazil) there where not too many successful cases. Thus, more than half a century after the so-called Year of Africa in 1960 the challenge of industrialization – now often named structural transformation – is still on the agenda.

Thus, as we reflect on the Russian Revolution we may ask whether the period of industrialization in the Soviet Union and later the Socialist Countries can provide some instructive lessons.

A closer look into the economic conditions and the political framework of the industrialisation process in the Soviet Union shows quite a number of important peculiarities.

First, size matters – the Soviet Union stretched over a territory 22 million km² and had a population of more than 200 million inhabitants. Soviet leaders gained command over a huge domestic market. Moreover, for a long time the Soviet Union, as the leftwing historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote, ‘…formed a separate and largely self-contained sub-universe both economically and politically. Its relations with the rest of the world economy, capitalist or dominated by the capitalism of the developed countries, were surprisingly scanty.’

Secondly, political determination is decisive. Soviet leaders, in particular under the rule of Stalin, abolished virtually all forms of democratic political participation and opposition. They established a command-economy that applied on the one hand coercion and oppression as well as permanent political motivation campaigns in order to mobilise the necessary labour force.

Third, research and development facilities are important.  Despite that the main focus remained for a long time on ‘more and more of everything’ (more coal, more steel, more electricity, more roads and railways … more state control etc.) it was important from the very beginning that the Soviet Union had access to a huge body of academic institutions and gifted researchers as well as engineers. Furthermore, in the context of the current global ecological crisis, it is important to note that in the 1930s until the 1960s any awareness of environmental concerns hardly existed.

So, compared to the conditions under which the Soviet Union (and the countries of the Socialist Bloc) once industrialised the current conditions for ‘late-industrialisers’ are remarkably different in many regards.

Firstly, the most striking difference is related to size. There are obviously limits to all decisive economic factors: from resource consumption as well as to the levels of (environmental) pollution and to the generation of energy out of fossil recourses. But there are also size-related requirements when it comes to the efficiency parameters of industrial manufacturing which needs large – essentially global – markets. Therefore, in regard to limits of pollution and resource endowment as well as market size, structural transformation in Africa will have to coincide with structural adjustments elsewhere on the globe. In other words: there is no possible industrialisation in Africa without de-industrialisation in other parts of the developed world.  The structures of the current international division of labour will inevitably have to change (see Salvador Ousmane’s blogpost).

Secondly, while the industrialization of the Soviet Union focused on the establishment of industries which should have reduced the input of human labour (though the technologies in the Socialist Bloc failed to achieve  significant ‘labour saving’ compared to developed capitalist countries) the current industrialisation challenge to the Global South must combine the abundance of human labour (the demographic factor) while extending the limits of material resources (accompanied by the growing ‘production’ of dangerous waste) and the constraints in the supply of renewable energy.

Thirdly, however, there is a striking similarity when it comes to political will and long-term political commitment. Certainly, the political system of the Soviet Union with its very limited or non-existent democratic freedoms is not the model to follow today. But, what is truly needed is a long-term and unwavering commitment in Africa to the ‘project’ of structural transformation, formerly called industrialisation. In order to meet the requirements of market size and the challenges of establishing state of the art research and development facilities a tremendous amount of regional and international co-operation is essential. And this, again, is not a short term ‘project’ which can be completed in one election cycle. Furthermore, a serious structural transformation project has to break with the myth of an inevitable, everlasting extension of a process called globalisation. But even the left today has obvious difficulties in accepting a strategic approach of delinking.

Prabhat Patnaik, the Marxist political economist, believes that we have to confront the necessity of ‘delinking’ ‘from the regime of globalization so that the nation-state acquires an autonomy vis-à-vis international finance capital.‘ As Patnaik wrote in 2017, ‘The need for delinking from the current regime of globalization is often not appreciated within the left, which makes significant segments of the left, no doubt unwittingly, subject to the hegemony of neoliberalism. Breaking out of that hegemony is the first priority for transcending the current conjuncture.’

To conclude, industrial development or structural transformation is a very complex process that cannot be completed successfully in a single country (unless it is very large and politically powerful – which does not apply to the overwhelming majority of the countries in the Global South). Given the inevitable global structural adjustments, this project needs to be based on international co-operation and solidarity – understood as the deliberate respect for the well-intended interests and concerns of partners and the explicit abstinence to make use of historically (colonially) acquired structural advantages.

If the remarkable insight (during the days of the co-called refugee-crisis) of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel – ‘successful global development will not work unless all continents of the world benefit from it’ – acquires any serious meaning then international co-operation and shared development efforts have to become the order of the day.

Arndt Hopfmann studied Economics and African Studies at Karl Marx University in Leipzig between 1977 and 1982. He holds a PhD in development economics. After his academic career he took up various positions in the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (a political foundation/think tank close to the Left Party in Germany) with which he worked as head of its regional office in Southern Africa (2003–2006). Currently he is researcher and senior advisor on economic and trade issues to the Foundation.

Questioning Power?

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A Report on the Rosa Luxemburg Conference, Berlin, 13 January 2018

By Heike Becker

The years 2017 and 2018 present the Left with multiple significant anniversaries. Hot on the heels of the centenary of the Russian Revolution are the international Marx200 events to commemorate the birth of Karl Marx on 5 May 1818. The more recent past becomes alive again in the critical remembrance of ’Global1968’, commemorating the student revolts of half a century ago.

As the country of Marx’s birth (and one of the centres of the 1967/68 activism), the German Left is challenged perhaps more than most to respond to these significant dates – not to mention even that the country’s political history also has the centenary of the German ‘November’ revolution coming up later in the year when on 9 November 1918 Berlin witnessed the social democrat Philip Scheidemann’s declaration of the German republic and the end of imperial rule, followed a mere few hours later by the pronouncement of a socialist German republic by Karl Liebknecht, a founder of the Spartacus Bund and the German Communist party (and who was murdered two months later on 15 January 1919 – on the very same day his comrade, the great Rosa Luxemburg was also killed). No wonder, a joke has been making the rounds among activist intellectuals in Berlin that a year-long sabbatical from their usual duties would be needed to read, study, write, and act appropriately on all of these important anniversaries!

What do these dates mean for Africa? In most contexts the continent does not even come up – an excellent exhibition currently on show in the German History Museum on the Russian Revolution, for instance, presents details of its consequences for countries across Europe but makes only one brief mention of the continent — in the form of an exhibit of a 1920s French right-wing poster that defamed the communists for backstabbing la nation in the colonies. Similarly, a recent publication by a German historian, dubbed ‘1968: youth revolt and global protest’ includes chapters on Paris, and on the events in the United States, Germany, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and the U.K. in ‘The West’, supplemented by a chapter on ‘Movements in the East’, which discusses protest in Prague, Poland and the GDR. Neither Africa, nor indeed any part of the Global South are mentioned. In conversations I’ve had with African-focused colleagues, comrades and friends over the past weeks in Berlin they have expressed frustration, time and again, that it was difficult to raise awareness on events, or consequences of these historical moments on the continent.  

Achille Mbembe speaking at the conference. Photograph: Heike Becker, 13 January 2018

It was laudable then that the organisers of the Junge Welt newspaper’s Rosa Luxemburg Conference chose a focus on Africa for their 2018 event. The 23rd instalment of this annual event took place on 13 January under the banner ‘Amandla! Awethu! Questioning power’. According to the organisers, 2,700 people had paid the entrance fee of 23 Euros to attend the event held in a major conference hotel, and located in Berlin’s historical working-class neighbourhood of Moabit.

The junge Welt describes itself as ‘left’ and ‘Marxist-oriented’. Historically it was the daily that had the highest circulation in the former East Germany, and was published in the GDR by the ruling Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) youth organisation. Now formally independent of any political party, the paper is a hub of a tendency on the left that still roots itself firmly in an affirmative memory of the GDR political tradition. This includes a particular, one may say, peculiar perspective on internationalism.

The conference embodied this perspective in its peculiar contradictions and unevenness. The programme included some excellent presentations by African writers, activists and artists. The Nigerian writer and activist Nnimmo Bassey spoke elaborately and passionately about the connections between natural resources, mining, violence and ecological destruction. As a long-term activist against “big oil”, the extraction and pollution caused by Shell and other companies in the Niger delta, he certainly knew the field well. He referred to instances across the continent to demonstrate his argument about the intricate consequences of what he called “extraction without responsibility” as an expression of a logic of power, built on relationships built from colonial times, and resulting in ecological collapse. Bassey got most applause for his expansion on resistance by “communities who want to live life in dignity”, from the Niger Delta’s struggles dating back to the 1980s through to that around the Great Lakes in East Africa, and the protests of fishing communities in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province today. Being a writer, in addition to his life-long role as an activist Bassey emphasised that protest movements also need to ensure that “we own our stories and tell our narratives to build bridges across the Global North and the Global South”. The audience gave him an unequivocal, well-deserved ovation for his call for a revolution on the continent, and beyond that should be fought for through local resistance and global solidarity.       

In the afternoon, the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama presented some of his work, and spoke about it engagingly in conversation with the editor-in-chief of Melodie & Rhythmus, the cultural magazine and sister-publication of junge Welt, Susann Witt-Stahl. Mahama, who had earlier this year participated in the German major contemporary art biennale documenta 14, works in photography, installations and performance art that impressively demonstrated contemporary artist-activist perspectives on industrial and urban landscapes, labour conditions and protest on the continent. In the conversation Mahama elaborated on his critical view of contemporary art as intervention.

The last speaker for the afternoon was Achille Mbembe, the leading social and political philosopher of postcolonial conditions. Mbembe who spoke as an acute observer and critic rather than as an activist still received a tremendous reception for his radical points about both the continent as the ‘laboratory’ of global developments and the underlying conditions of the mass refugee emigration from Africa. In his presentation he placed emphasis on human mobility, and the compounding issues of safety and identity. Mbembe pointed out that key among the problems of current democracy was “how to control the movement of human bodies”, which he said constituted a “key philosophical question of our time”. In this context, while not going into much detail, he suggested the need for a “borderless world”, and spoke for the abolition of borders – a phenomenon which had little historical evidence on the continent -, and presented a wide-ranging critique of the prison system. In his expansive argument he spoke about both the racism of imprisonment systems in general, and the massive landscapes of captivity, prisons and especially camps in Europe. The latter was much more of a prominent feature of the European continent than at any other time before, he emphasised, touching if ever so briefly on the German history of the 1940s.

These were brilliant radical presentations by leading African intellectuals, artists, and activists. The conference had some more interesting moments, such as the – brief, much too brief – scene extracted from a new play currently on show that features the ‘official’ political persona of Rosa Luxemburg juxtaposed with her more private moments. Touching also presentations of solidarity activism with, and by Mumia Abu-Jamal, journalist and ex-Black Panther activist from Philadelphia who has been in jail for 36 years. Equally impressive, if even more emotionally touching was the brief speech by the brother of Oury Jalloh, the Ivorian immigrant who was burnt to death in a prison cell in the southeastern German town of Dessau in 2005. Until now, the family and activists demand a full investigation of his violent death. Called upon by Jalloh’s brother the hall – packed to its 1,500 seat capacity – rose for a minute of silence.

Such moving moments and the passionate interventions by the invited speakers from the continent were set off however by parts of the conference that made me wonder about the brand of internationalism that guided the event.

Focusing on African politics and struggle. Photograph: Heike Becker, 13 January 2018

There was, for one, the embarrassingly uncritical celebration of Cuba as a model of “another world that is possible”. This sentiment was repeated over and over again by members of ‘Friends of Cuba’ activist groups from Germany and Switzerland. Cuba was presented as the socialist country that had been engaging in selfless and historically, culturally sensitive solidarity with Africa. The invited Cuban speaker, the journalist Enrique Ubieta praised Fidel Castro as “an African”, and drew extensively on Frantz Fanon’s sociological writings on psychiatry and medicine in revolutionary Algeria, thus drawing a direct analogy between Fanon’s protagonists in the Algerian revolution and Cuban doctors working in Africa. In Ubieta’s speech, the Cuban medical doctors sent to African countries as representatives of a “revolutionary medicine” closely listened to their patients in order to learn from them, and to treat them in careful consideration of their ‘culture’. His bold statement was that there were no cultural conflicts between the Cuban doctors and their African patients, “if there were any conflicts, those were only conflicts of class struggle”, Ubieta pronounced. While these unflinching claims were perhaps understandable for a representative of official Cuba, more embarrassing – to this observer – were the unquestioning, staunch endorsements and celebrations of “the Cuban people” and “Fidel”, over and over again. Cuba was the place and the history from which to learn, Fidel was the mentor of socialist solidarity, or so it was said.

Following the Cuba-to-Africa presentation, the conference called for a resolution for solidarity with Venezuela, the “brotherland of Cuba” against the Latin American country’s “reactionary opposition and interference by the United States and the EU”.  There was no discussion, instead the resolution was adopted without any debate, the audience was called to join the stage, which only a few did. Though most of the audience rose from their seats to chants of “Hoch die internationale Solidarität” (Long live international solidarity).

The uncritical celebration of Cuba and Venezuela as models of socialist hope and solidarity made me wonder about those attending the conference. Reading the junge Welt newspaper leaves no doubt that for the editors and most contributors the end of the former Soviet Bloc and the GDR has thrown out models of another, better world, alternatives to capitalism. More than that, though: they recall the former ‘East’ nostalgically as a better world already realised. Walking around the hall I noticed that many of the audience were of an older generation (60+) and nodded approvingly to statements from the stage (made by the German organisers rather than their international guests) that “we have to insist against the capitalist mainstream that the GDR was bad” (to paraphrase the sentiment).

Part of the endorsement of the former Stalinist rulers was an apparent sense of solidarity with states, Cuba, Venezuela, also an astoundingly uncritical celebration of China’s contemporary role on the continent. The latter was presented by German speakers as much as by Ding Xiaoqin, an economics Professor from Shanghai who spoke, as the true alternative and hope for African development today. China’s economic cooperation with African countries, and its investments on the continent were unflinchingly portrayed as being of mutual benefit and an act of solidarity between countries with a common experience of colonialism. Cuba, Venezuela, China –as states – clearly seem to be needed for the brand of internationalism embodied by the ideological heirs of Eastern and Central European Stalinism.

In addition to, and complementing the state-centred solidarity serious questions arose for me noting the absence of contemporary young protest and democracy movements across Africa during the conference. The day-long event passed without any mention whatsoever of any of the significant protest movements that have taken to the streets (and to social platforms) from Burkina Faso and Senegal in the West to South Africa and Namibia in the South (to mention just a few).  How on earth, one has to ask, can a conference that claims to “question power” on the continent ignore the popular movements, mostly of young people, against authoritarian regimes, against enduring racism, austerity, and myriad forms of social inequality? What kind of internationalism can be silent about young Africans and their demands and desire for social justice? Whose power is not questioned?

The Rosa Luxemburg conference left me with many questions.

Heike Becker is a regular contributor to the www.roape.net. As a writer and scholar. she directs research and teaching on multiculturalism and diversity as Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

Featured Photograph: The Internationale projected on a screen during the conference (Heike Becker, 13 January 2018).

Environmental Crisis, Africa and National Development

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By Salvador Ousmane

Following a fascinating ROAPE/TWN workshop in Accra in November 2017, several vital questions were raised about radical economic development on the continent. In this blogpost I want to focus on the issue of climate change, economic growth and transformation.

Climate change is just one of a range of factors which suggest that continued economic growth and development under capitalist conditions is not compatible with our current society. Africa is being hit hard by global warming (experts estimate the continent will be affected 50 percent more than the global average) and may lose 50 percent of its food production by 2020. At the same time, its population is expected to double by 2050 and again by 2100.

In place of development (national or otherwise), I argue, we need to be campaigning for the redistribution of wealth – i.e. demanding the more equitable distribution of existing wealth, rather than greater economic growth in the hope that some of this additional wealth will trickle down to the poor majority. 

Debates at the workshop discussed the nature and influence of the Russian revolution. I am of the view that there was a counter-revolution in Russia led by Stalin in the late 1920s and the 1930s that led to the emphasis on socialism in one country and national economic development rather than redistribution of wealth. This move was attractive to the first wave of African leaders after independence due to the rapid economic growth arising from state-led development in the Soviet Union. So Marxism came to be associated with faster state-led economic growth rather than spreading existing global wealth more equitably (for an account of the influence of the revolution on the continent, see Matt Swagler’s post here).

We need a return to the ‘classical’ Marxist tradition and to break with calls for further national economic development, or for what Samir Amin has labelled the ‘national sovereign project’ (see his interview on roape.net here). 

Climate change is only one factor or planetary boundary in what Marx call the metabolic rift – the break between humans and their natural environment that was triggered by capitalism. He used the term to conceptualise the ecological crisis inherent in capitalism, and it’s the break in the ‘interdependent process of social metabolism’. This rift or break between humanity and the rest of nature is generated by capitalist production and the rupture between country and town (see John Bellamy Foster’s work for a full description of this process). 

Part of this process, this catastrophic rupture of humanity and the natural environment, also includes other processes. There are many examples of the metabolic rift generated by capitalist production on a global level: For example, the extinction rate of species may currently be a thousand times the rate of the last few million years. Ocean acidification has led, for example, to the bleaching of coral reefs. Biochemical flows, mainly through the widespread use of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilisers have resulted in algae blooms. Deforestation has cost the world nearly 40 percent of its forests contributing to climate change and loss of genetic diversity.  Nigeria, for instance, only has 10 percent tree cover left and is losing more forested areas each year. Furthermore, freshwater use has led to a lack of safe water for humans. One in five Nigerians do not have access to safe drinking water. There is also what has been called ‘water wars’, for example, the Ethiopian threat to dam the Nile and China’s great dams. Finally, atmospheric aerosol loading has led to air pollution and smog (made worse by European diesel manufacturers fiddling the emission tests on their cars). An estimated three million people each year die prematurely due to air pollution.

In Nigeria, for example, climate change has already had catastrophic impacts. It has been a major cause of the Boko Haram insurgency in the North East of the country. Lake Chad, that borders North Eastern Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, was once the largest fresh bodies of water on the African continent. It was a major source of fish and provided irrigation for millet and sorghum that was eaten across Nigeria and the region. The lake provided livelihoods for thousands of communities. However, according to the United Nations, the lake has shrunk by as much as 95 percent since 1963. The Doron Baga settlement, which used to be by the lakeside, is now 20 kilometres from the shore. Among other elements, Boko Haram has fed directly from the economic collapse –  the ‘rift’ in the complex interdependence between human settlements and nature –  around Lake Chad. In February 2017, the Governor of Borno State claimed that the Boko Haram insurgency had resulted in 100,000 deaths and over two million refugees in his state alone.

Images of Lake Chad from 1973 to 2001 (NASA satellite images)

The example of China’s rapid economic growth also illustrates graphically the exhaustion of capitalist development, or in Marx’s term the rupture between humanity and our natural environment.  To fulfil its global climate stabilization obligations, China needs to reduce its fossil fuel consumption by nearly 70 percent before 2050. This is needed to fulfil its commitment to reducing global carbon dioxide emissions. So, between 2010 to 2050, China plans to build 2,000 giga-watts of ‘clean electricity’ (about twice as large as the present size of the entire U.S. electricity generating capacity). But this projected massive growth in clean energy will be insufficient to offset the necessary decline in fossil fuels. As a result, Chinese energy consumption will have to decline at an average annual rate of 0.8 percent from 2010 to 2050. How is this conceivable within capitalist development?

Transposing this scenario to the world scale means that the path to economic development of the Global South based on carbon fuels (coal, oil & gas) has been cut off. The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in at least a two degree increase in temperature –  in other words, we cannot add further emissions in the future. Recently these arguments have been made by Jason Moore, using the concept of ‘Cheap Nature’ he writes, ‘capital is seeking profitable investment opportunities in a world in which there are really no more significant frontiers of Cheap Nature. These are not significant enough, in my view, to relaunch another golden age of capitalism.’  

The Paris Agreement of December 2015 aims to keep global warming to within two degrees and preferably below 1.5 degrees, but according to the Swedish scientist Staffan Laestadius global temperature may have already increased by almost 1.4 degrees centigrade over the last hundred years. Commitments agreed in Paris will probably double this at least, especially as Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the agreement. Trump is not alone, each of the ten Republican candidates in the last presidential race agreed that climate change was a non-subject.

It has taken 50 years for the current restrictions on tobacco to come into force, but this dangerous and addictive drug is still legal. In this case the answer is simple – stop smoking to avoid the risks of cancer.  With climate change it is not so simple, the people responsible for the mess are not those that suffer. The rich can continue to drive oil fueled cars, or expensive cutting-edge electric vehicles, while the global poor starve as land is purchased (or ‘grabbed’) by multinationals and foreign governments for the production of fuel or food for export.

There are solutions. Ultimately, it is estimated that to have an 80 percent chance of not exceeding a two degree increase in temperature then 80 percent of the fossil fuel reserves needs to be left in the ground.

If oil production was reduced, especially with co-ordination across OPEC and other oil producing countries, the price would go up and the oil producing countries, like Nigeria, could theoretically gain the same income from a reduced level of oil production. This is why Environmental Rights Action (based in Nigeria) for example, has been supporting local communities in their call for ‘leaving oil in the soil’, and they are demanding that no new oil fields should be developed.

And yet, how will the government of Nigeria manage its budget if 80 percent of the remaining oil is left in the ground? Half has already been extracted. So only the equivalent of a fifth of what has been extracted can be used as revenue for the Government.  In other words, in such a scenario, the Government has already had most of total possible income from oil.

Also, shifting to a low-carbon economy requires a dramatic transformation of physical facilities and skills, and fundamental changes in energy, transportation, and industrial processes. This process of construction and adaptation to a post-fossil fuel world will demand major technical innovations and very large financial investments. These are tasks that arguably can only be undertaken in a post-capitalist society and on a global level.

In addition, bringing in other factors or the ‘planetary limits’ listed above, means the current rate of global production and consumption has to contract sufficiently to allow for any future population growth – which remains high in Africa (about 2.5 percent a year).  We need a real paradigm change. Rather than more growth, we need to ensure that current resources, wealth and income are shared more equitably.  We currently produce enough to meet the needs of the many, but not the greed of the few.

This is only likely to happen if we have economies that are democratically planned.  Massive investments will have to be planned and companies have to be prevented from using oil, coal or gas. The current dominant neoliberal ideas (the free market, private sector emphasis etc.) run counter to this essential logic.

Economic and environmental development has rendered the nation-state incapable of solving the most pressing issues of human and social transformation. We therefore need a comprehensive change of direction if the world as we know it is not going to be destroyed completely. The longer this takes to happen, the more difficult the environmental problems that the new society will have to face.

These questions, the global environmental crisis and its impact on Africa, are central to our agenda of radical political and economic transformation on the continent. The workshop in Accra significantly contributed to these debates.

Salvador Ousmane is a Senior Lecturer and writer.

Featured Photograph: Lake Chad as seen from Apollo 7 in 1968.

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For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
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