Consciously Identifying as a Ugandan Comrade

May 23, 2018

By Norah Owaraga

‘Imperialism in Africa today, the place of class struggles and progressive politics’ was the theme of the ROAPE Connections workshop that was held from 16^_17 April 2018 at the Council Chamber of the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. I was privileged to attend the workshop, on invitation and sponsorship of ROAPE.

For me the first major conscious awakening that the workshop ignited was to note that workshop participants referred to each other as comrade – even I was referred to us a comrade. And I thought, what qualifies one to be a comrade? More specifically, what qualifies me to be a comrade? Am I deserving of designation comrade? What does one mean when they refer to another as a comrade? How should one feel when another refers to them as a comrade?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, comrade means, ‘a friend, especially one who you have been involved in difficult or dangerous, usually military activities.’ I wondered what difficult or dangerous activities the workshop participants had been involved in or are currently involved in, in order for them to have become comrades. I wondered what difficult and dangerous activities ROAPE thought I had been involved in or that I am currently involved in, in order for ROAPE to consider me to be among comrades.

The Cambridge Dictionary, however, also offers a second meaning of comrade as, ‘a member of the same political group, especially a communist or socialist group or a trade union.’ Even with this second definition I had questions of whether the workshop participants were homogenous. Were we truly of the same political group? Were we really of the same persuasion? Yes, many questions for me were sparked off by the workshop – questions that I am now grappling with and perhaps will continue to do so in the longer-term.

Within the context of the workshop, however, my feeling is that the participants felt that we were comrades, in the sense that we each have socialist agendas. So, for me, the workshop triggered a further journey of self-discovery; a journey for me to consider consciously identifying as a socialist comrade. A journey to find out what it was in me that ROAPE saw to make them consider me a comrade.

If a comrade is a socialist, as in she or he who aspires to be driven by moral incentives over and above the material kind, I wondered, in modern day Uganda – where I am from – who is a comrade really? How might one identify a Ugandan comrade? What distinguishes a Ugandan as a comrade? Or perhaps, there is no such thing as a Ugandan comrade for all comrades are the same the world over?

Is it truly feasible that working class internationalism exists and is concerned with a single global class struggle? Does international socialism truly exist? Is internationalism the central logic within which the series of ROAPE workshops are being organised? Or are the ROAPE workshops being organised on the basis of an appreciation of separate localised struggles around the world, and particularly within the African Continent which is ROAPE’s primary focus?

Right from the presentations of the first workshop panel on ‘Imperialism and the state of class struggle in Africa’, and the discussions that ensued, I have become convinced that my journey of self-discovery to consciously identify as a leftist socialist needs to be informed by an appreciation of localised struggles within my homeland, Uganda.

At the workshop, however, discussions on contemporary imperialism tended to take on a binary format, which pitied them (the imperialists) against us (the victims of imperialism). We seemed, for example, to primarily consider the Global-West – specifically the G8 Countries – and China as the imperialists, on the one hand and African countries as the victims of imperialism, on the other hand (see the roape.net debate on imperialism here).

Accepting that an imperialist nation uses capitalism, globalisation and culture, in order to extend its power over another sovereign nation, I wonder about how efficient our binary discussion was. In fact, I am of the view that the notion that African nations, such as Uganda, are simply being used by G8 countries or China provides a smoke screen that masks local struggles.

Internal struggles within each country exist. The challenge is recognising and identifying the struggles and who the players are. The workshop discussed the applicability of the concept of ‘class’ to Africa. In Uganda the concept of class is particularly challenging to use as an analytical framework. The majority of Ugandans are self-employed smallholder farmers who own the land on which they produce and own the homes in which they live. The dichotomy employee versus employer is not always distinct. Thus, such popular socialist debates on job creation, minimum wage and on employee working conditions, for example, divert attention away from the more relevant debates for Uganda, like those on the terms of trade for smallholder farmers, farm-gate prices, for example.

As our workshop discussions ensued, I tried to locate Uganda, as a country, and to locate an individual Ugandan within the context of the second panel, ‘Legacy of Russian Revolution and Arusha Declaration.’ Though I wondered why ROAPE chose to draw lessons from the Russian Revolution as opposed to drawing lessons from the life and work of revolutionaries from the African continent, such as Mozambique’s Samora Machel, Ghana’s Kwame Nkurumah or even from Latin America, such as Argentina’s Che Guevara who fought ‘imperialism’ in the Congo in the 1960s.

I also wondered why ROAPE chose not to directly draw lessons from how the socialist beginnings of President Museveni were not sustain, for he is clearly now considered, perhaps, the biggest advocate against socialism on the Continent. Speaking in front of a huge crowd gathered to witness his swearing-in as Uganda’s new president on January 26, 1986, Yoweri Museveni, stated, ‘no one should think that what is happening today is a mere change of guard: it is a fundamental change in the politics of our country’. How did he transform from being a comrade to an agent of imperialism and a servant of capitalism? Or, as some argue, he never was actually a comrade? If that is the case, it is interesting to analyse why he hoodwinked us into believing he was a socialist in order to capture state power.

My journey of self-discovery continues. I am looking to find Uganda socialist role models who embody socialist ideals so that I may appreciate the true principals of what it means to be a comrade in modern day Uganda. The need for self-reflection and self-auditing is a priceless benefit that I took away from the workshop.

The search for famous Ugandan socialist role models is proving more challenging than I thought it would be. The other famous Ugandan comrade, other than the President Museveni of 1986, is Mahmood Mamdani, whose work I am familiar with and to a significant extent admire. However, apparently, Mamdani does not necessarily always conform to the ideals of a comrade, some socialists argue at the workshop.

During panel three on ‘The state of progressive politics in Africa today: organisation, forms and the agents of social transformation’ there were glimpses of who modern East African socialists might be. I feel that the breakout sessions that were cancelled would have generated more insight on local struggles within East Africa and thus who the modern East African socialists really are and where they organise. But, all in all, for me the workshop was greatly beneficial. I am energised and inspired to find and relate with those whom Che considered as comrades, those who ‘tremble with indignation at every injustice.’

Norah Owaraga is a Ugandan researcher and activist whose areas of interests include social institutions, culture, food insecurity and African knowledge systems. Her blog can be found here.

Voices from Dar: Interviews from ROAPE’s Workshop

ROAPE

May 22, 2018

At last month’s ROAPE Connections workshop in Dar es Salaam (16-17 April, 2018), activists and activist-scholars came together to discuss radical political economy and struggle in Africa. Over two days debates explored contemporary activism, resistance and research across the continent.

The workshop was the second of three in Africa between 2017-2018. The first was held last year in Accra, Ghana (material, blogposts and videos from Accra can be found here). The third will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2018. The workshops link analysis and activism in contemporary Africa from the perspective of radical political economy.

Among the questions that were raised in Tanzania were the lessons that can be drawn from revolutionary historical transitions, including the Russian revolution, and the demise of colonialism in Africa. In what ways do economic crisis, land alienation and dispossession, unemployment and migration generate local resistance and what forms have resistance to the increased financialisation of globalisation taken? And what alternatives to (neoliberal) capitalist social and economic transformation are being debated in Africa?

In this blogpost roape.net publishes the first in a series of short interviews conducted at the workshop. We hope these posts will continue the discussions started in Accra and Dar and draw in other voices.

Interview with Brian Kamanzi

Interview with Peter Dwyer

Interview with Issa Shivji (and Peter Lawrence)

Interview with Trevor Ngwane

Interview with Sabatho Nyamsenda

Interview with Muthoni Wanyeki

Interview with Tina Mfangwa and Monika Shank

Interview with Noosim Naimasiah

Interview with Tamás Gerőcs

Interview with Norah Owaraga

Interview with Karl von Holdt

Interview with Simon Rakei

Interview with Godwin Murunga

Tunisia in Crisis: Protest and Transition

ROAPE

May 18, 2018

Popular Protest and Class Struggle in Africa – Part 12

By David Seddon

In the last issue – the latest of a series on popular protest in those African states where long standing presidents have attempted to consolidate their grip on politics by extending their legitimate period in office, often by changing the Constitution – I considered the case of Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe was eventually forced at the end of 2017 to step down as president and give way to ZANU-PF’s Emmerson Mnangagwa.

In this issue I examine the background to the events that took place at the beginning of this year in Tunisia, when what appeared at first sight to be old fashioned ‘bread riots’ revealed the deep crisis of the Tunisian political economy and consider the significance of the local elections in May.

Tunisia: a brief historical review

Tunisia achieved independence from France in 1956 with Habib Bourguiba as Prime Minister. A year later, Tunisia was declared a republic, and Bourguiba became its first President.

Tunisia under Bourghiba experienced two decades of relative stability and economic progress, but the global economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s had its effect. In late 1977, growing dissatisfaction with economic conditions led to a wave of strikes which effectively brought whole sectors of the national economy to a standstill. The army was called in to deal with the strikers and, in response, the General Union of Tunisian Workers (the UGTT) called a national strike, which was observed throughout the country in January 1978.

Hardliners in the government voted for the repression of the strike movement with a view to destroying the power of the trade union movement, which remained strong and when disturbances broke out in Tunis during the general strike, the army was given carte blanche to intervene. Estimates of the number killed varied between 50 and 200. Some 800 people were arrested immediately, and thousands of trade unionists were sentenced subsequently by summary courts.

Short term repression and a degree of medium term political liberalization – opposition parties were legalized in 1981 – resulted in a period of relative calm. But the economic difficulties that generated the popular protests had not been resolved. Structural adjustment and ‘economic reforms’ were implemented by the regime in Tunisia, just as they were across the developing world during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and they tended to be associated, again in Tunisia as elsewhere, with ‘austerity’ and cuts in subsidies.

Free markets and ‘bread riots’

In Tunisia, social unrest following price increases began in January 1984 in the Nefzaoua, a semi-arid region in the south west and historically the poorest region in the country, and then spread to other parts of the South. After the outbreak of mass protest in January 1984, a local observer in Kebili – one of the small southern towns where violent demonstrations had taken place – remarked that ‘it was not for bread that the young demonstrated, but because they were the victims of unemployment’.

The southern interior had a relatively high unemployment rate, and many had left the region for the more prosperous coastal areas in the north; some 60,000 had left Tunisia altogether to seek work in Libya. The region also suffered from the drought of 1983-84 which substantially reduced the local harvest. But many of those in power refused to accept that economic and social problems experienced by the mass of the Tunisian people – particularly the poor in the rural areas and small towns – underlay the social unrest.

The governor of Kebili in the West blamed ‘foreign-inspired agitators’, while in Gafsa, the ‘capital’ of the South, the governor identified ‘Libyan- or Lebanese-trained Tunisians’ as the leaders of the protests. This was justified by the fact that the south had been, for some time, an area where Libyan influence was felt to be considerable and where the main political opposition to the regime had been openly expressed in the recent past.

Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime and ‘neo-liberalism’

After the ‘bread riots’ of 1984, there was a short period during which the Tunisian government backed off somewhat from its ‘austerity’ programme and a degree of political glasnost (opening up) was allowed. But the economy was still in crisis, with 10 per cent inflation, an external debt accounting for 46 per cent of GDP and a debt service ratio of 21 per cent of GDP; and the regime itself was badly shaken. When, on 7 November 1987, after 30 years in power, doctors declared Bourguiba unfit to rule, his former security chief, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, assumed the presidency, in accordance with Article 57 of the Tunisian constitution.

Ben Ali initially promised a more democratic regime than that of Bourguiba. Indeed, one of his first acts upon taking office was to loosen restrictions on the press. For the first time state-controlled newspapers published statements from the opposition. In 1988, he changed the name of the ruling Destourian Socialist Party to the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD), and pushed through constitutional amendments that ‘limited’ the presidency to three five-year terms, with no more than two in a row. However, the conduct of the 1989 elections proved little different from past elections. The RCD swept every seat in the legislature, and Ben Ali appeared alone on the ballot in what was Tunisia’s first presidential election since 1974.

In the meanwhile, however, the ruling elite – including the president and his family – began to develop a reputation inside the country for corruption and criminality. In 1992 the president’s older brother Habib Ben Ali was tried in absentia in France for laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, in a case known as the ‘couscous connection’. French television news was blocked in Tunisia during the trial. The First Lady, Leila Ben Ali, was widely described as an ‘unabashed shopaholic’ who used the state airplane to make frequent unofficial trips to Europe’s fashion capitals and Tunisia refused a French request for the extradition of two of the President’s nephews, from Leila’s side, who were accused by the French State prosecutor of having stolen two mega-yachts from a French marina.

The next two decades saw the return of several Bourguiba-era restrictions. For many years, the press was allowed a degree of freedom, but it was always expected to practice self-censorship. This, however, increasingly gave way to official censorship. Amendments to the press code allowed the Interior Ministry to review all newspaper and magazine articles before publication. The dominance of the RCD was maintained by a combination of propaganda and repression, and Ben Ali was consistently re-elected as president with enormous majorities (well over 80 per cent of the vote) periodically through the 1990s and 2000s, the last time being on 25 October 2009.

The Ben Ali regime had initially presented itself as politically ‘liberal’. Independent human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, Freedom House and Protection International, persistently reported human rights abuses and serious restrictions on basic freedoms but these were largely ignored by ‘the international community’. A popular tourist destination for Europeans in particular, Tunisia was represented as – and was widely considered to be – one of the few democracies in the Arab world, despite the overwhelming dominance of the ruling party, the long duration of presidential rule by Bourghiba and Ben Ali, and the repressive nature of the state apparatus. It was also heralded as being relatively ‘secular’ in a region that was becoming increasingly marked by the rise of political Islam.

Economic reform and apparent success

The Tunisian economy had experienced a decline in the last years of Bourghiba, with a significant slow-down in growth and productivity between 1981 and 1987. But the change of regime helped business confidence at home and abroad, and a systematic programme of economic reform through the 1990s accelerated privatization, encouraged foreign investment and deepened integration into the European market. Tunisia signed up to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in 1994 and, in 1995, became a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and signed the European Union Association Agreement. A special programme was launched in 1996 to upgrade the industrial and manufacturing sector, and there was investment in transport and communications infrastructure. Efforts were made to expand the service sector in general and the tourist sector in particular.

Under Ben Ali, for a time, the Tunisian economy thrived. It was neither an economic miracle nor a full success story, but it did better than its neighbours. It achieved an average economic growth rate of nearly 5 per cent over the 1990s and 2000s, out-performing most other Middle Eastern and North African and lower middle-income countries. The service sector grew at over 7 per cent a year, while the export of goods and services expanded at an average rate of 8.6 per cent a year. It kept its domestic and external economic imbalances under control.

Thanks to its successful family planning policy – made possible by the prevalence of relatively ‘secular’ social attitudes – the population growth rate declined significantly, to around 1 per cent a year. As a consequence, Tunisia boasted a per capita growth in GDP of more than 3 percent a year during the 2000s. Its per capita income, which stood at $2,227 in 1990, had risen to $2,713 by 2005, and reached $3,720 by the end of 2010.

By the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, the Tunisian economy as a whole was relatively diversified, with strong foreign direct investment, the growth and development of new (mechanical and electrical) industrial activities, and an increasingly important role for the service sector, whose share increased from 55 per cent in the early 1990s to more than 62 per cent currently. The country also diversified its exports, with a relatively high proportion of manufactures (including mechanical and electrical goods as well as textiles).

The growth of inequality

The overall success of the economy, however, effectively masked growing inequality, both regional and social. Agriculture, which had stagnated and declined overall in terms of its contribution to national GDP, remained an important source of livelihoods in the Tunisian interior as a whole. The dynamic sectors of the economy were highly concentrated in the coastal areas of the north and the east, and in the larger cities and – as Habib Ayeb has remarked recently in his discussion of ‘food sovereignty’ posted in the roape.net interviews section – positive links between these ‘developed’ and ‘less developed’ regions/sectors have been historically limited.

President Ben Ali steered most of Tunisia’s riches to the northern coast. It received 82 per cent of development funds in his final budget. Today, the south and the west lag on almost every socio-economic indicator. Regional inequality, always a feature of Tunisian economy and society, had grown significantly (but unremarked) during the ‘boom’ years of the 1990s and 2000s. Even those areas that experienced significant ‘development’ were marked by inequality and unemployment as the ‘development’ that took place failed to benefit the majority in those regions and tended instead to ‘trickle up’ to the wealthy and privileged (as Ayeb has remarked in his recent interview). On 5 May this year, the Economist remarked that ‘though the interior contains much of Tunisia’s farmland, its mineral resources and some of its best tourist attractions, it reaps few benefits. Tataouine, in the south is the hub of Tunisia’s oil industry. But profits are whisked up north. The governorate has the country’s highest unemployment rate’.

Unemployment has grown, particularly in the interior (in the mid-west, the south-west and the south-east), and the disaffection and hopelessness of the Tunisian youth has been expressed for many years in high levels of migration to work in Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world. Rates of unemployment among those aged 25 to 29 rose from 13 per cent in 1984 (at the time of the ‘bread riots’ discussed above) to 25 per cent in 2008. Like many other African countries, Tunisia experienced the effects of the global rise in food prices in 2007 and 2008. The country also suffered, as did so many other developing countries, from the crash of 2008 and subsequent recession.

Major political disturbances of the kind experienced in many other African countries were largely prevented by the high level of subsidies provided by the government, although mine-workers in the south rioted, and there were strikes in the manufacturing sector and factory occupations. But it was not to be very long before the growth of regional and social inequality, and of unemployment, resulted in an outburst of popular protest in Tunisia, as elsewhere across the Arab World, in the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011.

The rise of political Islam in Tunisia

The underlying inequalities of Tunisian economy and society, and unemployment, and the impact of these on young men in particular, combined with the increasingly repressive policies of the Ben Ali regime, led over the years to considerable disaffection and to greater involvement with those Islamist groups that developed in opposition to his government’s neo-liberal policies and to the traditional secularism of Tunisian society. Under Ben Ali, the Tunisian government arrested and detained thousands of political Islamists in the 1990s. Not all opposition groups espoused violence or takfirism, yet the regime made little distinction between those representing legitimate political opposition and those with more radical agendas.

In 2000, Tunisian nationals Tarek Maaroufi and Seifallah Ben Hassine, also known as Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, founded the Tunisian Combatant Group. The group became an important vehicle for Tunisians’ participation in global jihadi-salafi networks, recruiting fighters to train and fight with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, providing logistical support to Algerian jihadis linked to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and plotting attacks from a constellation of Europe-based cells. Ben Hassine had spent time in Afghanistan and Chechnya before he was arrested by Turkey and extradited to Tunisia in 2003.

In some cases, such radical Islamists were encouraged by the Tunisian government to leave the country, to fight their jihadi cause abroad, in Afghanistan, Iraq or, later in Syria, in the hope that they might die on the battlefield and not return. At the same time, the government suppressed most overt religious expression and debate not sanctioned by the state, creating a religious vacuum that salafists and jihadi-salafists would later seek to fill. In 2002, Tunisian courts convicted 34 Tunisians of recruiting other Tunisians residing in Europe to join armed groups in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya; and a new generation of young men was incarcerated under a sweeping counter-terrorism law passed in 2003.

Hundreds of young Tunisians did leave their country to fight as jihadis abroad, though in fewer numbers than their counterpart in other North African countries. Around 400 Tunisians were among the ranks of the ‘Afghan Arabs’ fighting against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compared to an estimated 2,800 Algerians and 2,000 Egyptians. In the period after 2001, more Tunisians went to fight in Afghanistan, and, after 2003, in Iraq but according to 2006 estimates, Tunisians and Moroccans together constituted only around five percent of foreign fighters in Iraq, while Algerians represented almost 20 per cent.

The legacy of Tunisian fighters was significant, however, despite their relatively small numbers. Veteran jihadis built networks of recruiters, facilitators, and financiers within Tunisia as well as internationally that provided an infrastructure for the wider mobilization of Tunisian fighters after 2011.

The ‘Arab Spring’

It was in Tunisia that the incident occurred which many argue marks the beginning of the ‘Arab Spring’ – the wave of popular unrest that swept across the Arab world in the early months of 2011. A desperate street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set fire to himself in Sidi Bouzid, a town in Tunisia’s Centre-West. In his recent interview in roape.net, Habib Ayeb argues that what he calls ‘the constructed history’ of Bouazizi ‘has dispossessed the peasants of Sidi Bouzid and the rest of the country of their stories of struggles and resistance, stories with which the real history of Bouzazizi fits perfectly’. Ayeb comments that he has himself written on the relationship between the peasants of Sidi Bouzid, Bouazizi and the ‘revolution’ (see Ayeb’s ROAPE Briefing here).

He explains in the interview that Sidi Bouzid was the region of Tunisia that received the most investment between 1990 and 2011. ‘It is a region that had an extensive semi-pastoral farming system, and it became in less than 30 years the premier agricultural region of the country. Regueb, which is part of Sidi Bouzid, looks like California. Regueb is a perfect technical success, an exemplar of the Californian model. The problem is that the local population does not benefit. It is the people from Sfax and the Sahel who get rich in Sidi Bouzid, not the people of Sidi Bouzid. Hence the link with the story of Mohamed Bouazizi’.

Mohamed Bouazizi was a Tunisian street vendor of fruit and vegetables in Sidi Bouzid who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 in response to the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation inflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides. Bouazizi died at the Ben Arous Burn and Trauma Centre 18 days after he set himself on fire, on 4 January 2011. Simmering public anger intensified into mass protests following Bouazizi’s death, leading Ben Ali to step down as president on 14 January 2011, after 23 years in power.

Popular protests broke out in Sidi Bouzid within hours, and gradually became more sizeable over the next two weeks, with attempts by police to quiet the unrest serving only to fuel what was evidently becoming a significant movement. There were reports in mid-December 2010 of police obstructing demonstrators and using tear gas on hundreds of young protesters who had gathered outside regional government headquarters to demonstrate against the treatment of Mohamed Bouazizi. It is estimated that more than 5,000 people participated in the funeral procession that began in Sidi Bouzid and continued through to Bouazizi’s native village.

Coverage of events was limited by Tunisian media. After Bouazizi’s death, however, the protests became widespread, moving into the more affluent areas of the country and eventually reaching the capital. The protests constituted the most dramatic wave of social and political unrest in Tunisia in three decades, and resulted in scores of deaths and injuries, most of which were the result of action by police and security forces against demonstrators.

The protestors came from a wide range of different backgrounds but reflected for the most part the social groups that had been most adversely affected by unemployment and poor living conditions (ie the working classes and the rural poor). The demands of ‘the street’ referred to ‘freedom and dignity’ as well as to ‘bread and jobs’. Indeed, although in the West the uprising came to be referred to as ‘the Jasmine Revolution’, locally it was referred to as ‘the Dignity Revolution’ (Thawrat al-Karāmah).

The labour unions were heavily involved. So too were the various Islamist groups whose strength inside Tunisia had gradually increased over the years in opposition to the Ben Ali regime and whose links with other groups in neighbouring countries and across the Arab world had also developed with the general rise in political Islam. Notable among these was Ennahda, an Islamist party widely referred to as ‘moderate’, although sections of the party saw ‘moderation’ as ‘selling out’ on their core principles (see Anne Wolf’s history of the party here).

The protests became so intense that President Ben Ali fled Tunisia with his family on 14 January 2011. They first tried to find refuge in France, but this was denied them by the French government, eventually they were given refuge by Saudi Arabia with ‘a long list of conditions’ (such as being barred from participation in the media and politics), sparking ‘angry condemnation’ among many Saudis. Back in Tunisia, unrest persisted even as a new regime took over, following elections in October 2011 which resulted in a landslide for Ennahda.

Tunisia after the ‘revolution’

The process of political change in Tunisia since the Arab Spring and the so-called ‘revolution’ of 2011 has been complex and uneven, with the interim government led by the apparently ‘moderate’ Islamist Ennahdha initially – during 2011-2013 – trying to maintain a balance between the radical Islamists on the one hand and the old RCD loyalists on the other, and to ensure effective security for Tunisian citizens. Progress as regards both the development of democratic politics in general and the reform of the security sector in particular has been slow. However, some specific progressive reforms were achieved. These included the ratification of a procedural guide on human rights for internal security forces, the revision of laws governing arrest and detention, the legalization of unions for security personnel and the ending of the electoral role of the Ministry of Interior. The interim government also ratified several international protocols prohibiting torture and forced disappearance and affirming universal civil and political rights. A torture commission law was passed in October 2013 that subjected detention facilities to surprise inspections by human rights monitors; and the state of emergency, which had been declared in the wake of Ben Ali’s overthrow in January 2011, was finally lifted in March 2014.

One of the most controversial reforms was the formalisation of the ‘citizens’ committees’ that had provided basic security for local communities in the wake of the uprising. In November 2011, Ennahdha had formed these into an unarmed body, the National League for the Protection of the Revolution, which was granted legal status in June 2012. Ostensibly intended to root out ancien régime loyalists and prevent members of the former ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (the RCD), from re-entering political life, the League was seen by Ennahdha’s critics as an instrument to ‘Islamize’ law and order, a replica of ikhwanization in Egypt.

Detractors claimed that the League included ‘the scum of society, criminals, or remnants of the former ruling party, whose salaries were paid by Qatar and who were being Islamized and used against demonstrators’. Support for such local ‘vigilante’ groups also encouraged many of those with grudges against former security personnel, including the locally paid informers, to threaten and assault them with virtual impunity. Not all of these were Islamists; many were simply individuals who had suffered in various ways (for example, arrest, imprisonment, ill-treatment while in detention, etc.) because of charges brought against them on the say-so of a local informer.

Islamist ‘terrorism’ and state repression

From mid-2013 onwards, political violence, especially by increasingly militant salafists, evolved into a jihadist terrorist threat. Public opinion became more supportive of assertive security policies, and Tunisia’s political parties in turn became even less willing to pursue security sector reform actively. One consequence of this was that the police were increasingly able to act with impunity against those they deemed to be ‘undesirables’, whether Islamists or former RCD supporters. The police remained legally able to hold suspects for six days without pressing charges or processing them in the prison system, according to Human Rights Watch, which additionally gathered testimony showing that detainees were subjected to abuse during arrest and interrogation ranging from threats of rape, shoving, slaps, punches, kicks, and beatings with sticks and batons.

The government’s concern with the evident threat posed by the radical Islamists and the increasing influence of former RCD loyalists in this context brought it into direct conflict with efforts to implement ‘transitional justice’ to those who had suffered under the previous Ben Ali RCD regime. On 24 December 2013, the National Constituent Assembly (NCA) adopted a law on ‘transitional justice’, which set out a comprehensive approach to addressing past human rights abuses and provided criminal accountability via specialized chambers within the civil court system to adjudicate cases arising from past human rights violations, including abuses committed by military and security forces. The law also established a Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC) tasked with uncovering the truth about abuses committed between July 1955, shortly before Tunisia’s independence from France, and the law’s adoption in 2013.

Concern over ‘Islamization’ and a series of assassinations of secular politicians led to a crisis for the government, and Ennahdha actually stepped down following the implementation of a new constitution in January 2014. The party came second, however, with 28 per cent of the vote, in the 2014 Tunisian parliamentary elections, and agreed to form a coalition government with the largest secular party or bloc of parties, Nidaa Tounes. But it did not offer or endorse a candidate in the November 2014 presidential election.

In August 2014, Mehdi Jomaa – the Acting Prime Minister between 29 January 2014 and 6 February 2015 – ordered the suspension of 157 Islamist associations for alleged links to terrorism, basing his decree on a 1975 law that had in fact been amended after the 2011 uprising to limit this power to the judiciary. The government also shut down several radio channels and mosques that it accused of promoting religious extremism without judicial orders, while at the same time police assaults on journalists multiplied.

The security effort was primarily directed at the Islamist ‘threat’, but former RCD loyalists were also targeted where it seemed appropriate, and those who complained of being harassed and arguably persecuted by local ‘vigilante’ groups and disgruntled individuals tended to get short shrift from the local police and authorities. At the higher level, some action was also taken against senior RCD figures.

A tendency towards state repression was further strengthened by a series of incidents that highlighted the ‘threat’ of the Islamists. Tunisia experienced several deadly attacks by Islamists in 2015 that left dozens of people dead and others injured. On 18 March, two gunmen attacked the Bardo Museum, adjacent to Tunisia’s parliament, killing 21 foreign tourists and one Tunisian security agent. On 26 June, a gunman rampaged through a beach resort in Sousse, killing 38 foreign tourists. On 24 November, a suicide attack on a bus killed 12 presidential guards and wounded 20 others, including four civilians.

These attacks prompted the government to declare a state of emergency. This empowered authorities to ban strikes or demonstrations deemed to threaten public order and to prohibit gatherings ‘likely to provoke or sustain disorder’. At the same time, in July, the government approved a draft Law on Economic and Financial Reconciliation, which, if enacted, would offer broad amnesty to officials of the former Ben Ali regime and would terminate prosecutions and trials of, and cancel any sentences against, corrupt business executives who submit a reconciliation request to a state-run commission.

The contradictions inherent in the current political dispensation, meant that in 2015, Tunisian law still allowed police to deny those they arrested access to a lawyer for the first six days of their detention, typically the period when detainees face the greatest pressure to ‘confess’. The counter-terrorism law adopted in July 2015 extended this to a maximum of 15 days in the case of terrorism suspects, increasing the risk of torture.

On the other hand, on 2 February 2016, parliament adopted revisions to the Code of Criminal Procedure granting suspects the right to a lawyer from the onset of detention and shortening the maximum duration of pre-charge detention to 48 hours, renewable once, for all crimes except for terrorism cases, where pre-charge detention can last up to 15 days. Whether these formal rights are observed in practice remains to be seen.

In April 2016, the UN Committee against Torture welcomed constitutional and legislative progress in the fight against torture, but also noted with concern the persistence of torture in police custody, and consistent reports of the lack of due diligence exercised by judges and judicial police during investigations into torture or ill-treatment. Ironically, on 28 October 2016, Tunisia was elected to the UN Human Rights Council for a three-year term beginning in 2017.

Tunisia in crisis

By 2016, many commentators were remarking on the inability of the state to maintain effective security and to contain and control the various militant groups, many of them Salafist Islamist vigilantes and their opponents. They were also noting the impact of this political turmoil on the state of the economy.

The main industrial sectors, including the oil and gas industry and phosphate extraction, were increasingly threatened by capital flight and questions about future foreign investment, while tourism was adversely affected by the terrorist threat and the reality of attacks on tourist locations. The state corporations providing public utilities were sinking into deficit, and the STEG (the Tunisian Electricity and Gas Company) was obliged to take out an emergency loan from an African bank to maintain basic services. Smuggling was on the increase and revenues from customs and other sources of taxation were declining.

The economy had grown by only just over 1 per cent in 2015 and by 1 per cent in 2016, with agriculture in particular performing poorly. A national unity government – a coalition of the main political parties and civil society groups – was formed in September 2016 to tackle the urgent economic situation, the consequences of which posed a risk to ‘normal’ politics and to law and order.

In its 2017 Report, the international human rights agency, Human Rights Watch commented that on the one hand the government continued to consolidate formal human rights protections, while on the other serious violations by the state – including arbitrary house arrests, torture of detainees and restrictions under a state of emergency – also continued, and the ability of armed militant groups to terrorize their opponents was evidently not significantly diminished, despite these measures.

A new wave of popular protest

It proved not to be Islamist terrorism that threatened the status quo, but a wave of popular protest, which broke out in the second week of January 2018, across Tunisia but notably in working class suburbs, like Ettadhamen in Tunis, the capital.

The unrest was sparked by a package of tax increases, affecting dozens of consumer goods that took effect on 1 January, after the government had received ‘a nudge’ from the IMF, which had agreed to lend Tunisia $2.9 million to pay off its creditors. Fuel prices, which had been heavily subsidised, were raised, as was the price of bread and phone cards (now considered basic essentials). The government had hoped to reduce the budget deficit of six per cent of GDP and hold down public debt.

Hoping to head off further unrest, the government announced it would spend an extra 100 million dinars on welfare payments this year, pensions were also set to grow along with health-care benefits for the unemployed. But even these measures would not make much difference to the 240 dinars that constitutes the basic monthly wage. In any case, the explanations and concessions failed to stop the demonstrations. At their height, it was estimated that tens of thousands of people were involved.

When the carrot proved ineffective, the stick was used. The police arrested more than 800 people in a week or so, among them political activists and bloggers, and the army was deployed in some areas. By 20 January 2018, the protests had subsided. But the unrest was a symptom of deeper problems and at their peak there were thousands on the street.

Whither Tunisia?

Seven years after the ‘revolution’, many Tunisians have lost faith in the ‘democratic transition’ that they hoped would bring wider prosperity and greater security. A poll by the International Republican Institute, a US pro-democracy organization found that most Tunisians (over 80 per cent) think their country is going in the wrong direction, as compared with less than 30 per cent in the aftermath of ‘the revolution’ in 2011, and very few (under 20 per cent) consider it to be going in the right direction, as compared with over 60 per cent in 2011. Significantly, when asked whether prosperity or democracy was more important, almost two-thirds chose the former.

Undoubtedly, the ‘the democratic transition’ has stalled. Local elections, postponed four times, were eventually held on 4 May 2018. Ennahdha was the front-runner: with deep roots in the rural areas, including the south (Tataouine) and west (Kebili) – where poverty and unemployment continue to be rife – it was the only party to field lists in all 350 districts.

But both the main parties, Ennahdha and Nidaa Tounes, the secular party that continues to lead the national government, have lost much of their earlier allure and there is considerable disillusionment with regard to both parties. Polls suggested that barely one in five Tunisian planned to vote, compared with nearly 70 per cent in the most recent parliamentary election. This was the first election in which soldiers and the police could vote – they did so on 29 April, but turnout was a bare 12 per cent.

Some politicians feared that the elections would only serve to cause more anger and possibly lead to further disturbances, others feared that apathy and a low turnout would be the manifestation of despair. At least 33 people tried to kill themselves in 2018 in Sidi Bouzid, the impoverished region of about 430,000 people where the Arab spring began. Yet even with a wider mandate, local councils will have limited resources: Tunisia allocates just 4 per cent of its budget to local government (compared with 10 per cent in Morocco).

Whether Tunisia is able to progress towards a more open, more egalitarian economy and society, or whether the historic tendency to impose an authoritarian regime to promote ‘neo-liberalism’ will re-assert itself, remains open to question.

David Seddon is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world. He studied ‘food riots’ and protest in a ground-breaking study on North Africa and the Middle East Free Markets and Food Riots: the politics of global adjustment with his co-editor John Walton. Seddon also coordinates the roape.net series on Popular Protest and Class Struggle in Africa.

Featured Photograph: Demonstrators in Tunis on 1 May, 2012.

Is Imperialism still Imperialist? A Response to Patrick Bond

ROAPE

May 16, 2018

English_imperialism_octopus — An American cartoonist in 1888 depicted John Bull (England) as the octopus of imperialism, grabbing land on every continent. HWC925

By Walter Daum

In Towards a Broader Theory of Imperialism Patrick Bond joins in the debate between John Smith and David Harvey on roape.net over the direction of imperialism today. He criticizes both debaters for overlooking the category of sub-imperialism, a concept that can indeed help clarify some issues. But in stressing this and other important matters like environmental destruction and gender oppression, Bond sidesteps the major issue over which Smith challenges Harvey: what is the reality of imperialism today? Is it so different from the system described and analyzed by Lenin, Luxemburg and other Marxists a century ago that the traditional imperialist powers no longer drain value from the resources and labor of most of the world?

Bond is more critical of Smith than of Harvey, since he disparages Smith’s ‘old fashioned binary of oppressed and oppressor nations,’ just as Harvey rejects Smith’s ‘fixed, rigid theory of imperialism.’ But in avoiding the key issue Bond is in effect covering for Harvey: focusing on the theory of sub-imperialism serves to obscure the untenability of Harvey’s position on imperialism itself.

Has the drain of wealth reversed?

Let’s begin at the beginning. Smith opened the debate by challenging an assertion by Harvey:

Those of us who think the old categories of imperialism do not work too well in these times do not deny at all the complex flows of value that expand the accumulation of wealth and power in one part of the world at the expense of another. We simply think the flows are more complicated and constantly changing direction. The historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries, for example, has largely been reversed over the last thirty years (Harvey, 2016: 169).

As Smith says, this is an astonishing claim. If the flows of wealth and power are changing direction and have even been reversed in recent years suggests that the centuries-long drain of value from African, Asian and Latin American countries to the imperialist centers of Western Europe and North America has ended: apparently now the historically oppressed countries of the South (or the ‘East’) are exploiting the imperialist powers!

But Harvey does not quite say this. He uses the designations West and East rather than the now common metaphors Global North and Global South, shorthand for the imperialist powers and those they exploit. Harvey’s East and West, in contrast, are purely geographical terms and therefore analytically not very useful. His East includes a wealthy imperialist country, Japan, along with many poor and oppressed countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh. It also includes China, a country that achieved its independence from imperialism through revolution and has in recent years set record rates of economic growth by making its huge labor force available for imperialist super-exploitation – but which remains poor on any per capita basis. So, Harvey’s ‘East’ is at best confusing.

Harvey responded to Smith by claiming that Smith had badly misinterpreted his intent: he did not mean his East/West opposition to stand for South/North. If so, what then is Harvey’s point? He appears to be criticizing ‘the old categories of imperialism,’ but then he backs off and says that’s not what East/West means. Indeed, he doubles down on his East category. Two Eastern countries, China and Japan, he points out, accurately enough, now have the second and third largest economies in the world; and ‘the Chinese and the Japanese now own large chunks of a spiraling US government debt.’

As Smith notes, his argument appeared previously in the book The Empire of Capital. There, after quoting a U.S. State Department document that observes that ‘the unprecedented shift in relative wealth and economic power roughly from west to east now underway, Harvey added:

This ‘unprecedented shift’ has reversed the long-standing drain of wealth from east, south-east and south Asia to Europe and North America that has been occurring since the eighteenth century. The rise of Japan in the 1960s, followed by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong in the 1970s, and then the rapid growth of China after 1980, later accompanied by industrialisation spurts in Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia during the 1990s, has altered the centre of gravity of capitalist development, although it has not done so smoothly (2011: 35).

This makes the East/West opposition even more confusing. Japanese militarism and imperialism dominated and exploited parts of East Asia from the late 19th century through World War II, and Japan does so again today through its economic might. So, Japan cannot be part of any shift in the way value drains between East and West: it itself is in the East and it drains value from the East (now as in the past) as well as from many other countries around the world.

The role of China

China, of course, is the East’s heavyweight, and because of its economic heft the center of gravity of the global economy has indeed shifted eastward. Something like 80 percent of the world’s industrial workers are now in the South, most of those in China (an eye-opening fact brought to attention by Smith and an almost exact reversal of the ratio that obtained in the middle of the last century). China’s new role means that a lot of surplus-value is produced there; but it doesn’t by itself determine whose pockets the new value flows into.

Smith responded to Harvey by demonstrating, once again, that capitalist profits are still primarily collected in the imperialist countries of the ‘West’ (more properly the Global North, which includes Australia as well as Japan). The drain of wealth from South to North continues, and so (despite Japan’s imperialist presence in the East) does its distorted variant from East to West.

Nevertheless, a second important question arises: if the old categories of imperialism do not work, is that because China has crossed the divide and become transformed from one of the world’s most exploited countries into one of the exploiters? In particular, since China has accumulated a huge fund of capital which it invests all over the world, does this mean that surplus-value now flows into China? And if that is true, is China now imperialist in its own right?

Yes, some surplus-value does flow to China, mostly from the South. But China’s remarkable economic growth rests on the super-exploitation of its own proletariat, above all the hundreds of millions of displaced rural workers driven away from the land and into coastal cities where they work extra-long weeks, live often in cubicles or dormitories and are legally barred from the fundamental rights of health care and education for their children. That extreme super-exploitation (not just extracting an extraordinarily high rate of exploitation but even paying wages under what is necessary to reproduce the labor power of the working class) has created a great deal of surplus-value, much of which goes to imperialist investors. That flow still goes from East to West.

And yes, Chinese capital pockets some of the surplus-value produced there, and some of that is invested abroad, both in poor countries in Southeast Asia and Africa where workers can be paid even less than in China – and in enterprises, stocks and bonds in the West. But despite a net surplus in its foreign assets, ‘China remains a net interest payer to the world due to lower rates of return on its overseas assets.’ China owns nearly $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, which yield rates of interest of a few percent at best – close to zero, as Larry Summers has gloated. In contrast, imperialist investors in China currently earn twenty or thirty times that rate.[1] How this looks from the imperialist side was pointed out by Tony Norfield: ‘A key point is that interest costs on US foreign borrowing have been far less than the returns on US foreign investments. This has enabled the US to maintain a positive net investment income, despite the persistent, large deficit on its foreign investment position’ (Norfield, 2016: 169). All this powerfully suggests that the surplus-value flow from the U.S. to China does not match that extracted from China by the West.

To sum up on Harvey’s claim, there is a difference between the shifting balance of wealth between East and West, on the one hand, and the flow or drain of wealth between those nebulously defined regions, on the other. There is no question that the ‘East’ has gained relatively in wealth, mainly because of energy production in the Middle East and Russia and manufacturing in Japan, the Tigers and China. But that does not mean that there has been an epochal shift in the flow of value; it is extremely dubious that the directional flows of centuries have reversed and that the East, including China, is draining value from the West. Of course, some countries in the East, including China are also draining value from the South. But that is not what Harvey said.

Sub-imperialism

Now back to Bond. The purpose of bringing the theory of sub-imperialism into the argument is apparently to show that the South-to-North drain of value, Smith’s ‘unconvincing’ as well as old-fashioned binary, has to be supplemented by more complex and nuanced relations among states. It is certainly true that the Lenin’s ‘division of nations into oppressor and oppressed …[which] forms the essence of imperialism’ cannot simply be transferred from a century ago to the present; it has to be built on to account for the appearance of nations that exhibit aspects of both, that are both exploiters and exploited. Toward that end, Ruy Mauro Marini introduced the concept of sub-imperialism in the 1970s’s. Bond, quoting from a previous work by Smith, reminds us of Marini’s contribution:

Marini focused on the elaboration of sub-imperial power wielded by states that are incorporated into the Western system as regional agents of imperialism, in which, Smith agrees, ‘dependent economies like Brazil seek to compensate for the drain of wealth to the imperialist centres by developing their own exploitative relationships with even more underdeveloped and peripheral neighbouring economies.’

Marini spelled out his theory in many works. As I read him, Marini regards a state as sub-imperialist if is not imperialist overall (its economy is ‘dependent’) but it plays an imperialist-like role locally. Bond would seem to agree, since he refers to sub-imperial power as ‘wielded by states that are incorporated into the Western system as regional agents of imperialism,’ and he shares Marini’s interpretation that the sub-imperialist economies are dependent. Moreover, Bond has done valuable work in demonstrating that the BRICS states are not stalwart opponents of neo-liberal imperialism but rather accomplices with it; his studies of South Africa in particular extend the analysis beyond Marini’s original example of Brazil.

In responding to Smith, however, Bond undermines his own understanding of sub-imperialism by favorably referring to Alex Callinicos’s version of it, which (as he quotes) embraces ‘a broad category that includes Vietnam, Greece, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and South Africa.’ Vietnam does not belong in this company: since it has near-bottom labor costs with wages one-third of those in coastal China, Chinese capital moves there rather than the other way around; nor is it militarily the regional power in a neighborhood that includes China. Callinicos is also off-target at the other end of his broad sub-imperialist spectrum: he includes Australia, as if it were a country fundamentally exploited by imperialism rather than a second-level but fully imperialist power itself (1994: 45, 51).

I also do not agree that the sub-imperialist category should include all the BRICS. Russia, for one, stands out as a full-fledged imperialist power in its own right, even though its economy cannot match those of the major Western powers. In that sense there are parallels between Putin’s Russia and Tsarist Russia a century ago; recall that the classical Marxist theorists all regarded Russia as imperialist, of a non-standard form, because of its military and political weight. As for China, since it remains more exploited than exploiting, in that respect it fits the sub-imperialist model. But it wields global rather than regional power and influence. If it is sub-imperialist it stretches beyond Marini’s (and Bond’s) definition: it would be a global sub-imperialist sui generis.

Putting aside the question of how to characterize China in theory, to see how it affects the Smith-Harvey debate it is useful to look more closely at its global economic status. Even if it eludes the ‘old-fashioned binary,’ does its role justify the claim that ‘the historical draining of wealth from East to West … has largely been reversed.’

Bond presents evidence that ‘BRICS firms became some of the most super-exploitative corporations engaged in accumulation not only on their home turf but also in Africa.’ This, he argues, buttresses Harvey’s recognition in general of ‘complex spatial, interterritorial and place-specific forms of production, realisation and distribution’ and in particular that in Africa ‘Chinese companies and wealth funds are way ahead of everyone else’s in their acquisitions.’ That suggests that China is draining more wealth from Africa than is the West, so that even if the East-to-West flow of wealth has not been reversed, at least the South-to-East flow has outpaced the South-to-West flow; in that case much of the West’s potential draining of Africa would have been superseded by China’s.

But even that reversal is not happening. While China engages in the traditional imperialist trade policy of obtaining raw materials from states in Africa and Latin America and selling back manufactured goods, in the process often undermining local industries, nevertheless ‘China is not the largest investor in any part of the world: it is the fourth largest investor in Africa, third in Latin America, and third even in its own backyard, Southeast Asia.’ The U.K. and France, followed by the U.S., are still the largest investors in Africa.[2] In 2016, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) said that Chinese investment in the region constitutes a mere 1 percent of total inflows from all investor countries. [3] So, China is far from supplanting the traditional imperialist powers of the West in exploiting the resources and labor of Africa.

Bond criticizes Smith for not mentioning the role of the BRICS in exacerbating both super-exploitation and environmental devastation. But the plentiful evidence Bond supplies about the BRICS’ depredations does not address the issue that Smith raises against Harvey, namely that the East-to-West flow of wealth and value has not just been modified by the rise of China especially but has been reversed. Bond does not even mention the East-West issue in his response.

Bond is correct that Smith’s analysis of China is theoretically inadequate, but that was not Smith’s purpose here. I share Smith’s view that the rate of exploitation of China’s workers is far higher than that in the West, and that ‘there is a huge difference between an “emerging nation” whose leaders dream of becoming a new imperialist hegemon and the actually-existing imperialist powers who cannot tolerate such insubordination.’ Harvey, in contrast, seems to believe that China is already a rising imperialist power: he doesn’t say so explicitly, but that is a reasonable deduction from his disdain for the ‘crude and rigid theory of imperialism that John Smith espouses’ and his preference for a ‘more open and fluid analysis of shifting hegemonies within the world system.’

In any case, I agree with Patrick Bond that the analysis of sub-imperialism can enrich the debate. It helps disabuse readers of the notion that China and its fellow BRICS are an alternative to imperialism by showing that they too are exploiting the South. It also shows, however, that the BRICS are not exploiting the West – and so it counters Harvey’s contention, not Smith’s.

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

Featured Photograph: American cartoon of England as an Imperial beast controlling and occupying various regions (1888).

References

Alex Callinicos, ‘Imperialism Today,’ in Marxism and the New Imperialism (Bookmarks, 1994).

David Harvey, in Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (Columbia University Press, 2016).

David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Profile Books, 2011).

Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (Verso, 2016).

Notes

[1] ‘According to the Conference Board, American multinationals’ average investment return in China was 33 percent in 2008. In the same time period, a World Bank team found that the average investment return for multinationals in general in China was 22 percent. In contrast, in 2008, the 10-year US Treasury yield returned less than 3 percent.’ (Yu Yongding, ‘Imbalances in China’s International Payments System,’ Institute for New Economic Thinking, July 13, 2017; www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/imbalances-in-chinas-international-payments-system.)

[2] United Nations Conference on Trade and Investment (UNCTAD) World Investment Report 2015 lists Chinese FDI to Africa (2013-2014) as 4.4% of total foreign investment.

[3] In 2015 China was the ninth largest investor in Africa, making up 3 percent of global investment inflows behind Italy (7.4 percent), the United States (6.8 percent), and France (5.7 percent). Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), ‘Does China dominate global investment?’ (2018); https://chinapower.csis.org/china-foreign-direct-investment/.

Structural Transformation in the Countryside

ROAPE

May 9, 2018

By Bettina Engels and Kristina Dietz

Related to the recent ‘commodity boom’, mining is expanding enormously in almost all parts of the world. The literature on large-scale mining and artisanal and small-scale mining, its social and economic impacts, governance, and related conflicts, is likewise expanding (see Bebbington and Bury 2013; Campbell 2009; Engels and Dietz 2017). The recent mining boom related to the (re-)emergence of resource-led development strategies is conceptualised in terms of ‘extractivism’ or ‘neoextractivism’: a national, growth-orientated development pathway based on rent seeking activities, that involves the large-scale exploitation, production, and exportation of raw materials. Strikingly, the debate on extractivism makes relatively few references to the field of Critical Agrarian Studies. While Critical Agrarian Studies focuses almost exclusively on the agricultural sector and hardly deals with mining. As a consequence, both debates are pursued in parallel, though both present critical ways of analysing the restructuration of the global countryside.

This blogpost interlinks research on extractivism and the mining boom on the one hand, and Critical Agrarian Studies on the other. Relating these two fields of research proves obvious, as current trends in both agriculture and mining, namely the expansion of agro-industrial production and large-scale mining, are linked to the same overarching context that is the global pervasion of capitalism and related ‘multiple crises’. On the ground, the same population is often engaged in both sectors, and both processes trigger structural transformations of the rural countryside with similar effects.

Many national governments, regional development banks, and international organisations have put forward plans for intensified extraction of raw materials as an important growth and export-orientated development strategy. From the 1990s onwards, national governments in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, in the context of neoliberal structural adjustment programmes, have pushed forward new legislation in order to attract foreign investment: mining activities have been promoted and agrarian policies reformed. The latter have aimed to liberalise land markets, privatise land tenure, and capitalise the agricultural sector.

The increasing economic importance of the resource sector has resulted in many countries in an unprecedented spatial expansion of mining and agro-industrial production into areas hitherto sparsely exposed to capital forces. Against this background, struggles over land in general and mining in particular have increased around the world. A rising number of non-state and state actors have become involved in these struggles. The issues at stake are manifold. In some cases, the idea of extractivism is contested as a whole; in others, the underlying norms and political reforms that sustain extractivism as a development strategy are rejected or concrete projects for mining are opposed. Nevertheless, in many of today’s contestations over mining, the issues of conflict overlap.

This blogpost focuses on conflicts over mining and asks what insights Critical Agrarian Studies can provide us with in their analysis. Conflict is understood as social action that is structured through power and interests, and which is always embedded in overarching social structures (divisions of labour, power distribution, gender, class, and other social relationships). We argue that Critical Agrarian Studies can prove fruitful in the analysis of structural change in the countryside—in which the expansion of the extractive sector is a considerable factor—and in particular in conceiving the impacts of global transformation. From a Critical Agrarian Studies perspective, we are able to understand the origins of the expansion of mining, and to link it to an overarching political-economic context. In particular, Critical Agrarian Studies enables us to bring two core categories into the analysis of mining and related conflicts: labour and class. When it comes to understanding conflicts as social action, however, a firmly structuralist perspective such as that provided by Critical Agrarian Studies is stretched to its limits.

We begin by presenting the core tenets of Critical Agrarian Studies, outlining its theoretical foundations and the main questions for empirical analysis derived from it. Next, the insights that Critical Agrarian Studies provides for the analysis of the recent mining boom and related conflicts are discussed, particularly with regard to labour and class. In the conclusion, the potentials and limitations of Critical Agrarian Studies for understanding conflicts over mining are summarised.

Critical Agrarian Studies

Critical Agrarian Studies represents a field of research that unites critical scholars from various disciplines such as Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Geography, Global History, and Development Economics. Claiming to combine research and activism, ‘Critical Agrarian Studies are […] an institutionalized academic field, and an informal network (or various networks) that links professional intellectuals, agriculturalists, scientific journals and alternative media, and non-governmental development organizations, as well as activists’ (Edelman and Wolford 2017: 4).

Critical Agrarian Studies builds upon Peasant Studies, likewise an interdisciplinary field of research that has developed from the early 1970s onwards. Both fields share common theoretical grounds—Marxism, particularly Marxist analyses of the ‘agrarian question’—that engage with the processes, and implications and limitations, of capitalist pervasion of the agricultural sector; i.e. its transformation from subsistence and small-holder to capitalist production, including the separation of labour and the means of production. Critical Agrarian Studies, as opposed to Peasant Studies, shifts the focus towards the global political economy, embedding its analysis and findings in global processes. It starts from a critique of ‘peasant essentialism’ that was widespread, also among critical scholars, in the 1970s and 1980s. Peasants do not form a homogenous class, nor are rural populations limited to peasants. Rather, the livelihoods of people living in the countryside build on animal husbandry and pastoralism, fishery, paid labour in both agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, both formal and informal, crafts, trading, artisanal mining, and many others, as Henry Bernstein and Terence Byrnes emphasised in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change in 2001. Analyses of agrarian structures and change thus reveal how the peasantry relates to other social classes in terms of property relations, capital–labour relations, and rural–urban relations.

A core assumption of Critical Agrarian Studies is that agrarian and urban societies mutually constitute one another, in particular concerning patterns of production and consumption. Scholars from Critical Agrarian Studies analyse agrarian change by focusing on patterns of accumulation; on processes of production, i.e. the distribution of the means of production, technological changes, and labour commodification; and on how agrarian politics interact with processes of accumulation and production. Henry Bernstein, in his fundamental essay on ‘Class Dynamics and Agrarian Change’ in 2010 summarised this focus through four questions that guide the study of agrarian: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? What do they do with it?

Critical Agrarian Studies basically applies a structuralist perspective, prioritising historical developments at a macro level. At the societal level, analyses starting from the agrarian question investigate the formation and differentiation of rural classes. At the macro level, one important concept for the analysis of agrarian change in general and class structures in particular is the food regime. Food regime analysis aims at an ‘understanding of agriculture and food’s role in capital accumulation across time and space. In specifying patterns of circulation of food in the world economy it underlines the agro-food dimension of geo-politics’ (McMichael 2009: 140).

More generally, from a global history perspective, scholars have demonstrated how capitalism advances by expanding the ‘frontier’ of the exploitation of key commodities (such as sugar, rice, tobacco, cotton) to ever more remote and peripheral rural zones. Frontiers are thereby not to be understood as fixed borderlines, territories, or places, but as ‘socio-ecological relations that unleash a new stream of nature’s bounty to capital: cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials, and cheap labour’ (Moore 2010: 245).

Critical Agrarian Studies, however, due to its tendency to focus narrowly on ‘the’ agrarian question, ‘like the Marxism on which it draws, is not a consensus field’ (Edelman and Wolford 2017: 5). More recent contributions to the field, in contrast to the relatively schematic, world systems theory-led perspective advocated by Jason Moore and others emphasise the importance of ‘local and national dynamics’ (Bush and Martiniello 2017: 200). These studies investigate the respective histories of social struggles related to the economic valuation of agriculture under different systems (colonialism, capitalism, socialism) and the historical production of the social world. They look at the spatial dimensions of structural change in the countryside, and at human–nature and nature–culture relations. And they go beyond rural–urban linkages. They do this by exploring ‘nature in the city’ and similar planning logics in urban and rural settings.

Insights for analysing conflicts over mining

If one applies a narrow definition of ‘land-grabbing’ as restricted to the purpose of agricultural production, then it may seem reasonable to exclude land acquisitions for fossil and mineral extraction. This does not, however, imply that Critical Agrarian Studies is generally limited to such a narrow understanding. Quite the contrary, excluding mining risks losing sight of one of the core drivers of the current structural transformation of the global countryside. Parallels and linkages between agro-industry and large-scale mining are obvious: both are features of capitalism that are increasingly pervading remote rural areas all over the world. The same drivers, notably capital seeking opportunities of investment and profit maximising, and national governments seeking rents for debt reduction and development, advance the expansion of both.

Key commodities upon whose exploitation the development of the modern capitalist world is built are agrarian as well as fossil and mineral (such as coal, oil, iron, and copper). What is more, they are closely interlinked: cheap energy, raw materials, food, and labour depend on one another. As ?? Moore argued in 2010, cheap inputs are needed to generate high profits; when cheap inputs are difficult to acquire, capitalism risks falling into crisis. Hence the erosion of the ‘four cheaps’ fuels the appropriation of nature, meaning that capital intensifies to flow into commodity markets. This dynamic boosts both the expansion of agro-industry and large-scale mining.

So, what does Critical Agrarian Studies provide us with in the analysis of conflicts over mining? To begin with, it brings us back to the recurrent theme of the ‘agrarian question’: What happens if capital penetrates the countryside? One answer was provided by David Harvey in 2003: accumulation by exploitation is complemented by accumulation by dispossession. These accumulation processes do not go uncontested but are accompanied by conflicts and social struggles—both in urban and rural settings, and both related to agribusiness and mining. However, Critical Agrarian Studies has also demonstrated the fact that while capital is further taking hold of land and labour in the countryside, this does not mean that the complex forms of social and class differentiation that characterise rural zones in many parts of the world are disappearing. On the contrary, the expansion of capitalist landed property in recent years is associated with a consolidation of poor and middle peasants and the continuation of various forms of labour relations.

The recent boom in mining equally comprises large-scale, as well as artisanal and small-scale mining: though informal artisanal miners are in many cases expelled from territories under large-scale mining concessions, artisanal and small-scale mining is altogether expanding. A Critical Agrarian Studies perspective based on a full reading of the agrarian question, i.e. a perspective that is not exclusively concerned with class relationships in a narrow sense, thus promises to help explain the puzzling persistence of the ‘small’ in mining.

Historical materialist analysis, as advocated by Critical Agrarian Studies, uncovers patterns of accumulation and transformation, and their interrelations with cleavages in social classes. Thus, a major contribution that Critical Agrarian Studies brings to the analysis of mining conflicts is the focus on class formation and differentiation, class domination and subordination, and the roles they play in conflicts and collective action. This draws attention to the social differentiation of the still often romanticised and homogenised ‘local population’.

Labour

Existing studies on conflicts over mining mostly focus on the socio-ecological impacts of mining, and on conflicts emerging from environmental damages, loss of farm land and pasture, and the eviction and resettlement of villages. Anthony Bebbington et al. (2008) have argued that mining conflicts were historically characterised by labour struggles and conflicts between trade unions on the one hand and governments and mining companies on the other. The current territorial expansion of industrial mining (for example into indigenous territories and areas with small-scale agriculture and livestock farming) has resulted in both a shift in and an expansion of actor constellations in related conflicts and has widened the range of the subjects of conflict. Conflicts occur when local actors perceive the expansion of large-scale mining as a threat to their fundamental economic activities, or to their territorial, cultural, or political rights. Linked to these dynamics are conflicts over territorial control and access to water and land, over the effects on livelihoods, gender relations, and ecosystems, and over government regulations concerning the conditions for mining activities and the distribution of the profits and tax revenues of extractivism.

Critical Agrarian Studies, in contrast, brings labour into play—a topic that in recent studies of conflicts over mining has received less attention (with some exceptions, e.g. Bryceson and Geenen 2016; Larmer 2017; Rubbers 2010; Verbrugge 2016, 2017b). Referring to Bernstein’s four guiding questions above, an analysis inspired by Critical Agrarian Studies does not simply account for the quantity and quality of jobs created in the respective sector (agro-industry, mining, etc.) but also links these jobs to capital–labour relations and thus to overarching processes of development, both at the societal and the global level. Harvey’s concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ first coined in 2003 is fruitful for this purpose. Harvey refers to the privatisation and commodification of agricultural land and the shift of its control and use from family farmers and collectives to private agribusiness in the course of global processes of neoliberalisation. An equivalent shift can be observed in favour of large-scale mining for which both farm land and land used for artisanal mining is dispossessed.

Capital–labour conflicts do not, however, become less relevant, nor do large-scale mining ventures seize territories that were previously free from capitalist relations. It could be argued that with the expansion of industrial mining, the potential for labour-related conflicts also increases. Labour is a main argument in disputes over mining and might itself become an issue of conflict. Within and between communities affected by large-scale mining, costs and benefits are allocated disparately: some people—a minority in most cases—benefit from the mining industry in terms of employment and service supply; others at least hope to do so; and still others feel that they do not benefit at all but rather bear the costs. The proponents of industrial mining refer to its potential for employment growth and vocational training. The adversaries, by contrast, claim that the establishment of an industrial mine results in far less employment than people expect; that labour is mainly needed temporarily in the construction phase; that qualified and well-paid jobs are mainly taken by outsiders; and that, at the end of the day, a mine destroys more jobs and opportunities for income than it creates.

Analysing conflicts over mining also reveals that workers and unions are by no means necessarily in favour of industrial mining (at least not unconditionally) but frequently join hands with other segments of the popular classes—peasants, indigenous communities, herders, and artisanal miners among them—in mining-related conflicts. In Colombia, for example, the planned expansion of the Cerrejon Zona Norte coal mine in La Guajira province in the north of the country in 2014 triggered the formation of a multi-sector protest alliance consisting of indigenous women’s groups, a citizens’ initiative from the nearest city, human rights and environmental organisations from Bogotá, and unionists from Sintracarbón, the union of the Cerrejon mine workers. Cerrejon is operated by subsidiaries of the transnational mining companies BHP Billiton, Anglo American, and Glencore. The company justifies the expansion of the mine on the basis of job security and rural development. In reality, the expansion implies the resettlement of indigenous communities and the diversion of important streams of water in a region characterised by drought and poor water supply. The perception of the expansion of the mine as an existential threat to the water supply and thus to the sustainability of rural and urban life in the area has evoked the joint opposition of workers and other segments of the rural and urban popular classes (see for a fuller consideration Dietz 2017; García 2017).

Labour-related struggles can equally occur at artisanal mining sites. Though most artisanal mining is conducted informally and is not subject to formalised capital–labour relations, this certainly does not imply that the means of production are in the hands of those who work with them, that capital does not play a core role in informal artisanal mining, or that relationships of exploitation are absent. Quite the opposite, artisanal mining sites are characterised by complex power relations structured by—though not only—capital and labour. In Burkina Faso, for example, concessions for artisanal mining are in the hands of the local ‘Big Men’. Usually there is an ‘owner’ of the pit, who invests in the equipment and machines. The concessionaire and the pit owners make the biggest profits overall in artisanal gold mining. Nevertheless, informal artisanal mining offers a livelihood to a large number of people, even though it is largely under precarious conditions. The informal artisanal miners are organised into teams and work at their own risk. Furthermore, in addition to the teams who work in or on the pits, numerous others—men and women of all ages, as well as children and youths—are involved in processing the artisanally mined gold (see Chouli 2014: 29; Engels 2017; Luning 2006; Werthmann 2012). Such structural settings and social and economic relations—which are often perceived by external observers as chaotic but are in fact highly organised—characterise artisanal mining sites all over the world.

Class

Class as an analytical category is strikingly absent in recent studies on mining and related conflicts. In contrast, livelihood is quite a prominent concept (see Bebbington et al. 2008; Bury 2004), notably in research and policy debates on artisanal and small-scale mining (see Hilson et al. 2013; Hilson and Banchirigah 2009; Jønsson and Fold 2011; Maconachie and Hilson 2011). As Bridget O’Laughlin argued in 2002, ‘livelihood’ is overwhelmingly conceptualised in institutionalist terms that focus on the individual and his/her capabilities and entitlements—an approach that consequently loses sight of historically shaped structural causes of poverty. Obviously, rural poverty and everyday life realities are diverse and multi-layered and are ‘shaped both by exploitation and oppression and by resistance to them’ (O’Laughlin 2002: 513). Capturing the dialectic of oppression and resistance by referring to class and class struggle allows for a shift in focus towards (possible) collective action and its relationship to individual action—and thus for the analysis of conflicts.

Analysing conflict and collective action through the lens of class struggles does not necessarily imply a confusion of mass movements with formal organisation. Neither does the absence of identifiable movements imply that class is obsolete. One advantage of class as an analytical category is that it enables us to differentiate between protests that challenge the essential structures of authority and exploitation, and those that allow people to come to terms with these structures. In conflicts over mining, both forms occur frequently. Social actors mobilise in order to hamper or stop a mining project, or for the conditions to be changed (for example regarding compensation, resettlement, job creation, etc.). Implicitly in many cases, explicitly in at least some, such project-related claims are linked to more fundamental ones, challenging the basics of political authority and economic structures: the understanding of ‘development’, political and cultural rights, the recognition of rights to territorial self-determination and autonomy. A class-based analysis links struggles and claims to fundamental structures of society and the political economy, and thus helps us not only to differentiate and systematise actors and their claims, but also to reveal the transformative power of conflicts.

A class-based perspective, moreover, affords the opportunity to understand the configuration of actors in social struggles. Class-based analysis should therefore not be limited to the working class in a narrow sense (those selling their labour in the formal or informal sector) but should include the whole range of poor people. As E. P. Thompson (1991) demonstrated, rather than a fixed economic category, class is a social relationship, and as such, historically specific and context-dependent. For the purpose of the empirical analysis of social struggles in the global countryside, it is neither helpful to construe working and rural classes as opposed to one another, nor to simply give up on the concept of class in favour of other, allegedly immaterial categories such as ethnicity, indigeneity, and nationality. This is not to say that these categories are not central to the construction of collective identity, to social relationships of power and authority, and to the mobilisation of protest and other forms of collective action. However, focusing (solely) on cultural categories in the analysis of social conflicts and struggles poses the risk of losing sight of material inequalities and the political-economic structures in which they are rooted.

Protests and resistance do not take place in free, deliberative spaces but within social and political contexts that are structured by unequal material conditions. This being said, in-depth empirical research at the micro level of collective action in social conflicts, and analysis of the political-economic structures at the macro level, are by no means mutually exclusive but rather go perfectly hand-in-hand. David Seddon and Leo Zeilig proposed in 2005 the term ‘popular classes’: students, employees, small-scale farmers, self-employed from the informal sectors, petty traders, and the like. The concept can be deployed instructively, not only in the analysis of conflicts over mining, but also in struggles related to agrarian change in general. As O’Laughlin argued recently, focusing on class formation within the peasantry risks limiting our understanding of class alliances to the politics of anti-capitalist struggles.

Conclusion

To sum up, examining conflicts over mining through the lens of Critical Agrarian Studies offers analytical potential for the investigation of further dimensions of structural transformation in the countryside beyond the agrarian sector. Critical Agrarian Studies enables us to put the analysis of mining and related conflicts in a broader global historical context of commodity exploitation and frontier expansion. Notably, it sheds light on, and provides us with tools with which to conceive of, capital–labour relations and class formation and differentiation. Enlarging the concepts of capital–labour relations and class beyond a narrow focus on formal, wage-related labour proves particularly illuminating. It allows one, for instance, to systematically unfold social structures at artisanal mining sites without falling into cultural essentialism. It renders the diversity within and among the actors engaged in struggles over mining visible, and at the same time opens up the view on class alliances. In addition, by embedding conflicts over mining in an overarching context of structural transformation, an analysis inspired by Critical Agrarian Studies eschews the trap of making categorical differentiations between struggles over exploitation and struggles over dispossession, and instead highlights how they are in fact two sides of the same coin.

When it comes to the analysis of conflicts, the focus on overarching structures of the global political economy is at the same time a strength and a constraint of Critical Agrarian Studies. As long as we do not comprehend any contradiction that is inherent to capitalism as a conflict, but rather conceptualise conflicts as social action (that is, obviously, always integrated into overarching social structures), a rigorous structuralist approach, as is prevalent in Critical Agrarian Studies, has its limits. It fits perfectly for the unveiling of structural contradictions but fails to assist in understanding how social actors perceive, interpret, and evaluate them, and thus in tracing how structural contradictions become meaningful and relevant for individual and collective action. ‘Marxists see exploitation and oppression as inherently laden with conflict’ write O’Laughlin in 2002, ‘Thus, resistance does not have to be explained […] rather it is the ways in which it is expressed, confronted or suppressed that are of interest’ (O’Laughlin 2002: 515). But not every contradiction and grievance perceived by an actor necessarily results (immediately) in action; for example, due to power relations, actors do not necessarily have the means available—and which they consider appropriate—for such action. The range of options and means for action available to actors depends on their position in the social field, which is structured in terms of power.

Critical Agrarian Studies is considerably heterogeneous, it also includes less rigorous macro-structuralist approaches that build upon conceptual and research strategies from, among others, Anthropology, Radical Geography, and Political Ecology. In combining these strategies with thorough qualitative empirical research at the micro level, it thereby succeeds in analytically linking social action to overarching structures.

This blogpost builds upon debate during the workshop Critical Agrarian Studies held by the research group ‘Global Change—Local Conflicts?’ at Freie Universität Berlin on 12 May, 2017. We deeply indebted to the contributions and the vibrant and inspiring debates by all participants, in particular Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Ray Bush, Deborah Johnston, Robin Thiers, and Henry Veltmeyer.

Bettina Engels is political scientist at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin. Kristina Dietz is Director of the Research Group ‘Global change – local conflicts? Land conflicts in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa in the context of interdependent transformation processes’ (with Bettina Engels), at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Featured Photograph: A mine in Kailo in the Congo where they mine wolframite and casserite. Children work with their parents, helping with panning for the ore, carrying and selling goods to the workers (31 October, 2007).

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Securing Financial Markets: UK-Africa Relations after Brexit

ROAPE

May 4, 2018

By Sophia Price

The recent Commonwealth meeting held in the UK in April has thrust the organisation to the forefront of media attention in the UK, prompted by the treatment of the Windrush generation. Revelations about a highly racialized policy framework that operates to deny certain Commonwealth citizens their rights countered the pro-Brexit narrative of a special and valued partnership between the UK and its former colonies.

This narrative placed the Commonwealth at the forefront of a particular political vision of the post-Brexit future; one in which a resurgent Britain re-establishes what it had lost through its membership of the EU. Within this the Commonwealth has been (erroneously) constructed as a betrayed and neglected partner, forsaken for relations with European neighbours, but one which will be rediscovered and rejuvenated through the UK’s exit from the EU (See Murray-Evans 2016 and Langan 2016). This post-Brexit UK-Commonwealth partnership has been idealised as the means to delivering shared economic and political gains, abstracted from the violence of its colonial history and relations of subordination and domination on which it rests.

While this Brexit narrative is arguably more of an overture to non-African Commonwealth States, such as Australia, Canada and India, which the UK is particularly eager to conclude free trade agreements with, the reshaping of UK-Africa relations is also prioritised. It is undoubted that Brexit will have a fundamental impact these relations, and there is much focus on whether the UK can ‘cut and paste’ the controversial and highly contested Economic Partnership Agreements the EU has long been trying to conclude with regional groupings in Africa, into the UK’s own post-Brexit trade regime. There is currently little public debate about the desirability of wholescale trade liberalisation between Africa and the UK, although groups such as the Trade Justice Movement are pressing to ensure these processes are at least subject to democratic accountability and consideration by Parliament.

Since its accession to the EU in the early 1970s, UK trade and aid relations with Africa have been conducted both through the EU and in concert with EU policies. This allowed the UK to collectivise the costs of maintaining its relations with its former colonies, which was particularly important in times of crisis and economic malaise, while at the same time providing for the expansion of its arena of interest to those African states that had been beyond its colonial reach. The EU-ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific region) relationship embodied the reconfiguration of these relations into neo–colonial then neoliberal form, operated through a “partnership of (un)equals” characterised by John Ravenhill in 1985 as collective clientelism. This relationship afforded the UK a leading position in emergent European and global development frameworks. Its exit from the EU therefore places both the position of UK interests in Africa and its leadership role as a development actor in jeopardy. It is in this context we should view the publication of the Department for International Development’s (DFID) first post-Brexit Economic Development Strategy, published in January 2017.

Although the role of the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development has changed hands, the new incumbent, Penny Mordaunt, signaled the continuity of purpose in her statement this April which emphasised the centrality of private finance and the City of London in both helping to attract private investment to the Commonwealth and in developing capacity to insure against risk in nascent capital markets. This has been marked by the new partnership between the London Stock Exchange and the Nairobi Securities Exchange, ahead of other partnerships between the Bank of England and central banks in Sierra Leone, Ghana and South Africa. Such partnerships are designed to facilitate the development of financial markets and the associated regulatory and institutional frameworks, dressed in the language of expertise sharing, risk reduction, sustainability and growth.

The announcement by Mordaunt not only underlines the emphasis placed on the role of private finance in DFID’s Economic Development Strategy (2017) but also the important role and unique position the British state has in facilitating the expansion of markets for finance. As the report states, ‘As one of the world’s largest capital markets and a global centre for financial expertise, the UK has a central role to play in channeling private capital to developing economies.’ The Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), the government’s private equity arm, has been tasked within this strategy to act as a conduit for channeling UK government funds into Africa and other former colonies, whilst at the same time securing returns on that investment. Within the policy mantra of ensuring “value for money” the expansion of financial markets is promised to ‘open the door to a future free from aid dependency’ and the win-win of ‘doing good in the world’ whilst ensuring high returns on investments (see UK Government 2018).

This is particularly important in a domestic context where the provision of development aid has come under sustained attack from the right-wing press and sections of the Conservative party, coupled with revelations about the behaviour of (mainly white, middle aged, male) employees of leading NGOs heavily involved in the delivery and management of aid projects and in the policy process itself. The increased reliance on investment vehicles such as the CDC to ‘do good in Africa’ however relies on turning a blind eye to the evidence of its use of tax havens, its connections to labour rights abuses and the appropriation and enclosure of land in processes of capital accumulation as witnessed in its involvement in the palm oil company Feronia Inc in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (see War on Want reports here and here).

While the decision to leave the EU was unexpected and has presented a moment of extreme uncertainty both domestically and internationally, UK policy makers have been quick to seize this as an opportunity to recast the UK’s global position. With the repatriation of competences formerly pooled at the European level, notably in the areas of trade and international development, UK policy, its relations with Africa and other members of the Commonwealth are being strategically positioned to secure the UK’s post-Brexit competitiveness and the centrality of the City of London to global financial markets. As has been seen with trade policy, however this marks an ongoing commitment to global neo-liberalism rather than a retreat from it.

Sophia Price is Head of Politics and International Relations at Leeds Beckett University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Price is currently conducting research on the EU’s External Relations with West Africa, and West African Microfinance Programmes.

Featured Photograph: UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashsabane at the 11th UK – South Africa Bilateral Forum in London, in October 2015.

Decolonising Intervention: International Donors and Mozambique

ROAPE

May 1, 2018

By Meera Sabaratnam

Things look different, depending on where you stand.

This is a simple proposition, but one which, if pursued a little further, deeply challenges dominant approaches to social science, many of which are premised on ignoring or denying the partial character of the social-scientific gaze.

I don’t disagree with the ambition per se of attempting to de-parochialise our own understanding of a phenomenon through deep and wide-ranging research; indeed this is what I love about being a researcher. Furthermore, just because things look different depending on where you stand, does not mean you cannot learn more about something, or learn to understand it better. I do not reject the possibility of a better and wider understanding just because points of departure are always partial.

Yet, the first step for studying complex social phenomena must be a recognition of and a grappling with this proposition.

Beyond this, various feminist, anti-colonial and Marxist thinkers have advanced a further proposition: that power relations can be better understood when you look at them ‘from below’, i.e. from the perspective of the disempowered parties.

This stems from the idea that relations of power put different cognitive demands on people by virtue of that relationship.

Patricia Hill Collins for example points out that domestic labourers must acquire an intimacy both with the ways of thinking of their employers/masters, and with their own sense of how to navigate and survive in this system.

And W.E.B. Du Bois famously drew attention to what many continue to call ‘double consciousness’ – that is, the idea that African-Americans had to apprehend and negotiate the racist negations of mainstream American society, whilst simultaneously cultivating a distinctive intellectual tradition.

If they are right, then scholars engaging with relations of power from any field of study – and particularly in the field of ‘political science’ – should be especially interested in the perspectives and experiences of the relatively disempowered as a point of departure for analysis.

In and of itself, such orientation to research does not complete the tasks of scholarship. The presentation of analysis and interpretation are also duties of the researcher and will be influenced by their perspectives and beliefs, and so we are back to the inescapability of the opening proposition.

Yet, the researcher working in good faith must listen to and hear things which they did not know and did not expect and must deal with questions of conflicting interpretation. Yet the writing can become itself a space for amplifying interpretations and ideas which are conventionally suppressed, and through this, the hope is that we can move towards a deeper and better understanding of different phenomena.

The other hope is, of course, that espoused by all ‘critical’ scholarship – that by challenging forms of received wisdom or analysis one may challenge the unjust distributions of power that underpin them.

***

My book, Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique, attempts such a study, with regard to post-war international state-building in Mozambique. The point of the book is to develop an analysis of these practices rooted in the interpretations and perspectives of the targets (i.e. intended beneficiaries) of this intervention.

The first two chapters in the book focus on questions of analysis and method.

In the first of these, I argue that Eurocentric habits of analysis have characterised much of even the critical literature on international statebuilding, focusing principally on the interveners and tending to obstruct the interpretations and viewpoints of the targets of intervention. In the second chapter, I lay out decolonising strategies for re-thinking the analysis and perspectives of disempowered parties within the research. These advocate an engagement with the historical presence, political consciousness and material conditions of such parties. They are informed by feminist standpoint arguments about the character of social-scientific knowledge and methods.

There are then three chapters which analyse specific aspects of international state-building in Mozambique through the perspectives and experiences of its targets.

The first examines the state under state-building, through a particular focus on the health sector. The analysis narrates the continual un-building of the state through intervention rather than building of the state. Practices of intervention produce centrifugal rather than centripetal tendencies overall. The character of ‘innovative’ interventions is repetitive, and policy promises and ideas go regularly unfulfilled. This is all wholly unsurprising to the targets who are very aware of the interacting structural phenomena of ‘protagonismo’ and dependency, that both characterise and explain the aid relationship. Whereas ‘protagonismo’ represents the perceived need by donors to continually re-insert themselves into the processes and narratives of state-building, dependency relations explain why they cannot be substantially resisted even where it is painfully obvious that they are dysfunctional.

Next, I look at the political economy of agriculture and the attempts to ‘develop’ it since the end of the war in 1992. As the targets of intervention are well aware, this has been largely without major investment at the level of farmers, focusing on small shifts in producer practice (e.g. sowing seeds in a straight line) without the infrastructure or resources for wider transformation (e.g. tractors). Alternatively, it has been through the encouragement to produce cash crops for unreliable markets, again without adequate infrastructure, which can pose a more serious risk to food and land. The analysis is systematically one of both disappointment and the opportunity costs entailed in becoming part of these systems; a sense that the producers themselves are a disposable part of the intervention process. Yet agricultural policy continues to be a space where various policies and strategies circulate, and money is spent, without remaining in the state or reaching its target farmers.

Finally, the book examines the politics of anti-corruption in Mozambique. For many Mozambicans, corruption was not a widespread phenomenon until the arrival of international aid in the 1990s and the forms of capitalist transformation brought with it, including but not limited to privatisation opportunities for the elite and the kinds of international lifestyles and transformations of the capital and other cities. Beyond donor-sponsored ‘good governance’ discourse, Mozambicans have a rich historical vocabulary around public service, greed, appetite and consumption that highlights the voracious character of personal predation, ‘savage capitalism’ and the aid machine. Indeed, such sensibilities draw attention to the heavily constrained nature of ‘good governance’ discourse as a means of contesting corruption.

From these points of departure, I argue that the implicit research question ‘why does intervention fail?’ changes to ‘why does intervention keep failing, despite its well-known challenges?’

The conclusions then weave together the analytic narratives developed within the research with the ‘coloniality of power’ framework proposed by Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo. The latter argues that power in the modern world is foundationally structured by a colonial asymmetry of being – relations of colonial difference – which produce differentiated forms of entitlement, status, obligation and presence.

I argue that these concepts offer, in comparison to existing analyses of state-building, a better explanatory framework which both helps describe the political and operational structure of interventions and their continued, repeated failure as engines of material and political uplift. On this reading, the failure is endemic to the hierarchical political relations (i.e. relations of colonial difference) in which the aid relationship is embedded.

The analysis suggests that ‘better state-building’ and ‘better aid’ can therefore not be achieved without some fundamental re-thinking of the problem of colonial difference.

Some prospective forms of redress are deceptively simple – they would simply require would-be donors to actually observe already-signed agreements about principles of aid, to stop systems of preferential subsidies to their own producers, to stop facilitating the laundering of public funds in Western financial institutions and the creation of illegal debts. Yet, more deeply, they require an ethics of solidarity and responsibility in aid that is egalitarian, respectful and reparative around the question of the ‘colonial wound’.

Meera Sabaratnam is Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on practices of international state-building and development, decolonizing theory and methods, global history, southern Africa and the Indian Ocean.

This is a post on Meera Sabaratnam’s recent book Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique, which was published by Rowman and Littlefield last year (2017). It is available as an open access *free* PDF download here, thanks to research funding from SOAS. If tweeting, please use the hashtag #DecolonisingIntervention.

Photo Gallery: Dar es Salaam, 16-17 April 2018

ROAPE

April 30, 2018

The editorial team of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) recently organized the second of three workshops, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on the theme of ‘Imperialism in Africa Today: The Place of Class Struggles and Progressive Politics’. The Dar es Salaam workshop was organised under the auspices of the Julius Nyerere Resource Centre at the University of Dar es Salaam Convocation. Over two days the discussions were concerned not simply with an academic analysis of what is happening on the ground, but informed by political and social activism focused on what is to be done. This page displays images from the workshop taken by Jörg Wiegratz and Ray Bush.

Africa’s Left: An Undying Consciousness

ROAPE

April 26, 2018

By Takura Zhangazha

The editorial team of a legendary academic/activist journal the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) recently organized a workshop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Themed ‘Imperialism in Africa Today: The Place of Class Struggles and Progressive Politics’, it was a workshop that was always going to capture the attention of many pan-African and Africa based socialists.

It was a workshop that had as its primary intention an historical assessment of the state of Africa’s liberation and ideological liberatory left and its place in contemporary anti-global neoliberal and anti-imperialist politics. With a direct intention of discussing the future of pan-Africanism, socialism and how to counter contemporary imperialism.

I agreed to attend the workshop largely because of my own leftist political persuasions but also because of the evident need to revive pan-Africanist and socialist alternatives to the current regrettable dominance of contemporary African political and economic discourse by neo-liberalism. ROAPE has long played this role. In the words of the long-standing Tanzanian socialist Issa Shivji, ROAPE was never meant to be entirely academic but predominantly activist in intent and result. It was established to help inform not only socialist strategy during liberation struggles but later on in countering contemporary neoliberal political and economic narratives.

Linking the past with the present remains of vital importance, which ROAPE can still help us to do. A journal and website which has a radical left perspective on the political economy of the continent that has spanned the liberation struggle decades, and post-independence optimism that remained, even if only in academic practice for a time, committed to a people-centred and socialist optimism of a better life for all on the continent and in the world.

ROAPE therefore has come to represent the link between the organic intellectual and the organic activist. Hence most liberation struggle icons would find their way to the journal at the height of the struggle or in explaining their post-independence projects and impasses. This is one reason why so many of our struggle luminaries (Nyerere, Cabral, Nkomo, Machingura, Saul among others) would feature either by way of their own writing or analysis of the same in the journal’s pages.

But more significantly, ROAPE has also spent many decades analysing Africa from a socialist perspective and in respect to how socialism was/is the founding ideology of African liberation. Therefore, it was essential that the starting point for the workshop were the October 1917 Russian revolution as well as the Arusha Declaration of 1967 as authored by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (both of these events were debated in a particularly rich panel discussion at the workshop). These two global historical departure points (Russia 1917 and Africa 1967) are indelible in the history of Africa’s struggles against imperialism both in its past and contemporary forms. One representing genesis and the other a ‘textual’ idealism for a better future for all. The significance of both events as models for African liberation and post-independence futures were discussed in detail by participants.

For two days of debate in Dar es Salaam it was the African context of struggle and revolution that was an important and salient reminder of the history of the struggles against imperialism and an unrepentant global capital.

Even though I had not until the Dar es Salaam workshop been involved in ROAPE activities, I understood full well the urgency and importance of keeping the pan-Africanist and socialist counter-narrative, in academic terms and counter-hegemonic alternative in activist terms, alive.

New perspectives emerged from the workshop on the state of Africa’s left; I was nudged into remembering how we, as Africans and people with an evident sympathy toward the global left, are quick to forget our past in favour of a catastrophic neoliberal perspective when we should be proffering progressive alternatives. Both from an academic perspective as well as a leftist/socialist activism.

From an academic perspective and as informed by the values of ROAPE, I have come to a firm appreciation that Africa’s socialists must never abandon the pursuit of academic knowledge as it relates to socialism and people-centred democratic solutions. But, as the workshop reminds us, this always requires linking up with colleagues and comrades in the global north who also require acts of solidarity from those of us in the global south.

Even beyond this solidarity, I also realized that context always matters and that while socialism is still a credible global alternative it must resist dogma. Participants restated that our arguments for progressive change must always be contextualized and utilised to enhance a national and continentally grounded and progressive leftist consciousness.

In discussing the activism of the left at the workshop, it was reinstated that there is always a need to organically link older generations of activists with younger ones. To ensure that knowledge is passed on between more experienced activists and younger but more enthusiastic ones. This knowledge is not just in the form of what texts to study but what strategies and tactics need to be applied in today to keep the original vision of African liberation alive among younger generations. The workshop demonstrated a need for greater inclusive conversations between younger and older socialists on what a present-day way forward should look like. As informed by the past and contemporary realities the overriding theme of the workshop was ‘another world is possible’.

During the workshop, as an activist I also came to terms with some of the most difficult elements of Africa’s contemporary struggle against neo-liberalism – one of survival. Whereas in the struggles against direct colonialism there was an element of self-sacrifice, in contemporary times it has become more difficult to sustain activist work and practice. The neoliberal hegemonic onslaught in African societies makes a greater majority of our people feel hopeless and can make for pessimistic reading and analysis in some elite and academic circles. Yet, as we discussed during the two-day symposium, the intellectual reality of the matter is that we have not thought hard enough about the means and methods to counter these seemingly dominant narratives.

It was towards these purposes, questions and issues, that ROAPE convened the workshop. Two key objectives were achieved. Firstly, maintaining the socialist/leftist intellectual and activist fire burning beyond the crass neoliberal materialism that is creeping into African (and global) consciousness. Secondly, recalling the historical departure points for all progressive movements that were the 1917 Russian revolution against global capitalism and the revolutionary Arusha Declaration of early 1967.

Drawing from the intellectualism and organic activism of the past, fusing it with the energy and impatience of the more youthful participants at the workshop, we began to work out newer approaches that exploit the self-destructive contradictions of neoliberal capitalism for Africa and the world.

The continual questioning into the reality of imperialism, its current manifestations on the continent and the nature of class struggle remains important. Not only because of what Trevor Ngwane of South Africa, one of the participants at the workshop, called the Spirit of Marikana but more significantly because with greater concerted socialist intellectual and activist effort we can indeed raise our minds and fists to claim, as in the past, that ‘another socialist world is possible’.

Thank you Dar es Salaam. Asante Sana.

Takura Zhangazha is a Zimbabwean civil society activist who has worked in the field of media freedom and also within broader social movements. He is currently a member of a Zimbabwean social movement, the Committee of the Peoples Charter. A version of this blogpost was originally posted here.

Featured Photograph: Issa Shivji speaking at the ROAPE Dar es Salaam workshop, 16-17 April (Jörg Wiegratz).

Visions of Transformation: Oliver Tambo and Chris Hani

ROAPE

April 23, 2018

Secretary General of the South African Communist Party Chris Hani was killed at his home in surburba.. — Secretary General of the South African Communist Party Chris Hani was killed at his home in surburban Johannesburg April 10. Photo taken December 1991

By Alexander Beresford

April marks the 25^th anniversary of the deaths of Oliver Tambo and Chris Hani. While Tambo is often portrayed as an archetypal ANC moderate, Hani is popularly characterised as a revolutionary who bore the flame of a more radical vision for majority government.

Critically, however, both men supported the negotiated path to power and their very co-existence within the liberation movement points to one of the fundamental pillars of its longevity during the struggle period: its capacity to sustain multiple, competing ideological tendencies while crowding out the political space for alternatives to emerge.

This formed part of what I call the ‘sticky’ nationalism of the ANC – its ability to draw in and bind a broad array of social forces to its banner while also making it hard for them to peel away from the movement to mount a challenge to its hegemony.

Sadly, neither Tambo nor Hani lived to experience and confront the contradictions and crises generated by the ANC’s transformation into a party of government. This has profoundly altered the nature of the ANC’s approach to drawing toward it that range of social forces that are essential to its long-term future.

In this blogpost I will briefly outline two elements that contribute to the continued but changing “stickiness” of the ANC’s nationalist politics. First, the establishment of the ANC as a central gateway of resource distribution. Second, its continued effort to sustain a position as the political centre of South African politics through ideological gatekeeping.

The ANC as a centre of resource distribution

While a great deal of our attention is rightly drawn to South Africa’s vibrant civil society and the politics of protest, a great deal less scholarship is dedicated to researching and understanding arguably South Africa’s largest social movement – the ANC – and its position within the complex environment of post-apartheid society.

It might be less sexy to study than the loud politics of protest and resistance, but the reality is that while ‘insurgent’ citizens, movements and unions are an important and prevalent feature of South African politics, so too is the understudied, quiet and unassuming politics which contributes to the everyday acquiescence to ANC rule.

Understanding this quiet politics is critical to understanding the diffuse power of the ANC and the ‘sticky’ nature of its nationalist hegemony.

This quiet politics is to be found in the ways in which the structural violence of capitalism, racism and patriarchy is navigated by ordinary citizens. It can be located in the slow tedium of ANC branch meetings, where members and citizens alike arrive to lobby for the transformation that they and their communities are so dependent upon. This can evoke a personalised politics in which individuals and/or communities access jobs, housing or other vital public goods, not through impersonal state institutions, but through private networks connecting the dependent client to powerful party patrons. Seen in this light, engagement with the party and its local gatekeepers is not necessarily a political choice but a practical necessity for traversing a deeply inequitable society.

However, the ANC’s governance also entails a more formalised type of patronage. It can be found in the ways social grants serve to forge bonds of dependency between desperately deprived citizens and the ANC state. While such grants are often inadequate, and many experience difficulties accessing them, James Ferguson is right to highlight how they offer a tangible output in the absence of structural transformation. As Susan Booysen notes, this affords the ANC a paternalistic aura – an image that the ANC itself propagates through its continuous ideological positioning of the party as a vanguard of popular aspirations.

The bonds of dependency that these forms of patronage augment between citizen and the ANC state therefore contribute to the sticky politics of the ANC’s nationalism: they serve to reify the appearance of the ANC state as the ultimate patron to be petitioned for change. In this context, lobbying a local ANC branch or petitioning a powerful patron within the party are important forms of political agency that are often overlooked amid our fixations on protests and insurgent politics.

Ideological gatekeeping

This does not make the ANC immune to challengers, however. South Africa is now the most unequal country in the world in terms of income inequality, while unemployment and poverty remain high.

When confronted with resistance, the ANC has in some cases sought to employ a form of political abjection: ‘a sustained political strategy where in response to protests and dissent, sections of civil society are singled out and discursively elevated in their significance—usually well beyond their aspirations or material potential—as attempting to stir up frustrations and launch a broader offensive against the democratic state.’ In such circumstances, this reflects an effort to act as an ideological gatekeeper: striving as best they can to control access to the legitimate political marketplace, mediating which groups can legitimately contend for power and which are to be considered politically abject – a threat to the national interest potentially warranting illiberal sanction.

This can be witnessed in attempts to brand protest movements – such as the #feesmustfall protests – as hostile, foreign-inspired agendas. Government ministers and senior ANC officials lined up to denounce what they argued to be a ‘third force’ leading students astray and promoting a ‘white supremacist’ agenda. Similar accusations have been leveled at striking workers outside of the Alliance fold, with senior ANC figures and ANC discussion documents bemoaning the growth of an ‘anti-majoritarian offensive’ threatening South Africa’s democracy. In the case of the Marikana, ANC discussion documents argued that the police response was a reflection of the way the democratic state was being ‘goaded’ into defending itself.

These kinds of discourses have also been deployed to discredit critical journalists and opposition parties in order to divert political focus away from the shortcomings of the ANC government. For example, business elites allied to former president Jacob Zuma employed public relations firm Bell Pottinger, which launched a controversial social media campaign that aggravated racial tensions by blaming ‘white monopoly capital’ for the country’s ills, while discursively constructing those critical of Zuma and his allies as being symptomatic of a nefarious white minority politics (see Guardian, September 5, 2017).

Significantly, these discourses are also used to try and close down internal dissent by raising the ‘exit’ costs of leaving the liberation movement. For example, during NUMSA’s long exit from COSATU and its emergence as a political challenger to the ANC, union leaders supporting NUMSA were derided as forming part of a ‘counter revolutionary’ or ‘anti-majoritarian’ struggle bent on destabilising South Africa, overthrowing the democratically elected ANC, and disenfranchising ‘the masses.’

As I’ve argued elsewhere, these discourses are significant because ‘they reveal the continued (albeit defensive) potency of post-liberation nationalism: they serve to blur the fault lines between nationalist and class politics by contesting who can speak on behalf of ‘the workers’ and with what authority. In so doing, these discourses seek to render the politics of class and nationalist politics indissoluble, highlighting the ‘sticky’ nature of post-liberation nationalism.’

Could the ANC become unstuck?

Chris Hani and Oliver Tambo held very different visions for what transformation in South Africa ought to look like, but both found accommodation within the ANC’s broad-church ethos and its commitment to forging a democratic society.

However, both men would have found accommodation within ex-president Zuma’s ANC a challenge. Patronage politics and corruption have generated internecine factionalism within the ANC and the wider alliance, compromising the substantive quality of internal ideological contestation within the movement while also undermining its capacity to govern effectively.

Clearly, the use of patrimonial mechanisms of distributing resources, coupled with these forms of ideological gatekeeping, sit uneasily alongside the ANC’s long-standing commitment to democratic institutions and a politics of tolerance and non-racialism.

And yet, these are fiercely contested dynamics within the movement itself, and the ANC’s recent developments offer hope that some of these ‘tendencies’ will now be challenged.

The extent to which the ANC can regenerate the quality of its internal debate will determine its capacity to govern and to renew itself ideologically. This in turn will determine its capacity to draw in and bind to it the social forces it needs to reproduce its hegemony. Despite our scholarly fascination with protests and insurgents, I would argue the reality remains that the ‘stickiness’ of ANC nationalism will, for the foreseeable future, mean that the party’s internal contestation will continue to define the political landscape in South Africa.

Some of the arguments in this blog were first developed in my book, South Africa’s Political Crisis, and in a recent article with Marie Berry and Laura Mann ‘Liberation movements and stalled democratic transitions: Reproducing power in Rwanda and South Africa through productive liminality’ in Democratization’ (forthcoming).

Alexander Beresford is Associate Professor in African politics at the University of Leeds and a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. He is a member of the Editorial Working Group of ROAPE. He has recently published South Africa’s Political Crisis: Unfinished liberation and fractured class struggles Palgrave: Basingstoke.

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