David Harvey Denies Imperialism

January 10, 2018

By John Smith

David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and other acclaimed books on capitalism and Marxist political economy, not only believes that the age of imperialism is over, he thinks it has gone into reverse. In his Commentary on Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik’s A Theory of Imperialism, he says:

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 (My emphasis, here and throughout – JS, p.169).

For ‘East to West’ read ‘South to North’; i.e. low-wage countries and what some, including this author, insist on calling imperialist countries. To repeat Harvey’s astonishing claim: during the neoliberal era, i.e. the last 30 years, not only have North America, Europe and Japan ceased their centuries-long plunder of wealth from Africa, Asia and Latin America, the flow has been reversed: “developing countries” are now draining wealth from the imperialist centres. This assertion, made without any supporting evidence or estimate of magnitude, repeats similar statements in Harvey’s earlier works. In 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, for example, he says:

Disparities in the global distribution of wealth and income between countries have been much reduced with rising per capita incomes in many developing parts of the world. The net drain of wealth from East to West that had prevailed for over two centuries has been reversed as East Asia in particular has risen to prominence (p. 170).

The quote’s first sentence greatly exaggerates global convergence: once China is removed from the picture, and once account is made of greatly increased income inequality in many southern nations, no real progress has been made in overcoming the huge gap in real wages and living standards between the “West” and the rest.

The second sentence is refuted by a cursory examination of the single-most important transformation of the neoliberal era — the shift of production processes to low-wage countries. Transnational corporations headquartered in Europe, North America and Japan have led this process, cutting production costs and increasing mark-ups by substituting relatively high-paid domestic labour with much cheaper foreign labour. In his Outsourcing, Protecionism, and the Global Labor Arbitrage Stephen Roach, then a senior economist at Morgan Stanley responsible for its Asian operations, explained why:

In an era of excess supply, companies lack pricing leverage as never before. As such, businesses must be unrelenting in their search for new efficiencies. Not surprisingly, the primary focus of such efforts is labor, representing the bulk of production costs in the developed world… Wage rates in China and India range from 10% to 25% of those for comparable-quality workers in the US and the rest of the developed world. Consequently, offshore outsourcing that extracts product from relatively low-wage workers in the developing world has become an increasingly urgent survival tactic for companies in the developed economies.

The vast scale of production outsourcing to low-wage countries, whether via foreign direct investment or via indirect, arm’s length relationships, signifies greatly expanded exploitation of Southern labor by U.S., European, and Japanese TNCs, legions of workers who are moreover subject to a higher rate of exploitation. At times, David Harvey appears to recognise this reality. In his critique of the Patnaiks, for example, two paragraphs before his claim that the East is now draining wealth from the West, he notes “Foxconn, which makes Apple computers under super-exploitative labour conditions for immigrant labour in Southern China, registers a 3% profit while Apple, which sells the computers in the metropolitan countries, makes 27%.” Yet this, and the broader picture which this so eloquently illustrates, implies new and greatly increased flows of value and surplus value to U.S., European, and Japanese TNCs from Chinese, Bangladeshi, Mexican and other low-wage workers, and reason to believe that this transformation marks a new stage in the development of imperialism. David Harvey, in defiance of the evidence, but reflecting a widespread view among Marxists in imperialist countries, believes the opposite is the case.

Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital provides not only the earliest iteration of his view that the “East” is now draining the “West” of wealth, but also his source: Harvey quotes approvingly the “delphic estimates of the US National Intelligence Council, published shortly after Obama’s election, on what the world will be like in 2025. Perhaps for the first time, an official US body has predicted that by then the United States… will no longer be the dominant player…. Above all, ‘the unprecedented shift in relative wealth and economic power roughly from west to east now underway will continue’” (pp. 34-35). Harvey repeats this, but with his own twist: “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 18th century” (p. 35).

Yet, elsewhere in this book, Harvey acknowledges that “awash with surplus capital, U.S.-based corporations actually began to offshore production in the mid-1960s, but this movement only gathered steam a decade later,” and that the shift of production to “anywhere in the world – preferably where labour and raw materials were cheaper” was driven by the decision of US capitalists to export their capital (directly, via FDI, or indirectly, via capital markets) rather than invest it at home. All of this implies increasing metropolitan power over the recipient economies and increased exploitation of their living labour, for which the most appropriate term is ‘imperialism’. A clue that helps explain how Harvey rationalizes his denial of imperialism can be found in The New Imperialism where he says “transnational capitalist corporations… spread themselves across the map of the world in ways that were unthinkable in earlier phases of imperialism (the trusts and cartels that Lenin and Hilferding described were all tied very closely to particular nation-states)” (pp.176-177). In other words, it is deracinated, de-territorialised, depersonalised “global capital” that profits from the shift of production to low-wage countries, not U.S. and European multinationals and their capitalist owners.

David Harvey’s Commentary in the Patnaik’s new book is also remarkable for its reference to super-exploitation, notable for its absence in the rest of his work on imperialism and value theory:

The tropical and subtropical landmass has a huge labour reserve living under conditions conducive to super-exploitation. Over the last 40 years (and this is new), capital has increasingly sought to mobilise this labour reserve in search of higher profits through industrial development. If there is any one map that confirms the distinctiveness of the tropical landmass, it is one that shows the location of export processing zones, 90% of which are on the tropical landmass. And it is the labour reserve that is the lure not the agrarian base (though the partial proletarianisation that occurs as social reproduction is taken care of on the land while capital just exploits the labour at a less than living wage is undoubtedly important) (p. 165).

He does not define super-exploitation, but even its invocation is an important departure. However, he departs…but he does not arrive: “capital” remains a disembodied, deterritorialised abstraction, not the millionaire owners of multinational corporations congregated in the imperialist countries, allowing him to avoid the obvious conclusion: that this new and hugely important development implies a major boost to flows of value from low-wage countries to the imperialist centres. Harvey’s obfuscation of continuing imperialist divisions extends, later on the same page as the above quote, to the assertion that conditions in labour markets in ‘metropolitan’ and low-wage countries are converging and the borders between them are disappearing:

the distinction between the reserve [army of labour] in the metropolitan centre and in the periphery has been much reduced by globalisation in recent times, such that we can reasonably think of the capital-labour confrontation as being more unified now across the spaces of the global economy.

Harvey’s denial of imperialism is anything but clear-cut. His credentials as a progressive social scientist and a Marxist theoretician could not survive a categorical rejection of the contemporary relevance of imperialism, or refusal to acknowledge the persistence of its most naked and familiar forms. Instead, he obfuscates, sows confusion, and pretends to be agnostic on this question of questions. In his critique of the Patnaik’s theory, for example, he talks of “the imperialism problem—if such there is,” and gives, as an example,

the case of cotton, the depressed price of which has been destructive, particularly for West African producers. The point here is not to deny the transfers of wealth and value that occur through global trade and extractivism, or from geo-economic policies that disadvantage primary producers. Rather, it is to insist that we do not subsume all these features under some simple and misleading rubric of an imperialism that depends upon an anachronistic and specious form of physical geographical determinism. (p. 161).

The last part of this refers to the distinctive theory developed by Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik in A Theory of Imperialism; whether Harvey’s characterisation of it is fair is beyond the scope of this article, but it is abundantly clear that Harvey’s target is not some specious variant of imperialism theory, it is the theory of imperialism tout court, and all who consider themselves to be anti-imperialists.

To conclude: Harvey’s claim that the “East” is now exploiting the “West,” a claim backed up by nothing more than his authority, is false. He could not be more wrong, or about a bigger issue. The root of his error is his denial that the global shift of production to low-wage countries represents a major deepening of imperialist exploitation. In an excerpt from my book below, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, I trace Harvey’s failure to acknowledge or analyse this characteristic feature of neoliberal globalisation through several of his works, as far back as his celebrated Limits to Capital.

Excerpt on David Harvey from John Smith’s book Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 199-202)

Prominent among contemporary Marxist theorists, David Harvey has published a series of influential books on Marx’s theory of value, on neoliberalism, and on new imperialism. Because of the wide audience he has gained for his views, it is necessary to subject them to a severe evaluation, a task that can only be broached here.

The central argument in Harvey’s theory of new imperialism is that the overaccumulation of capital pushes capitalists and capitalism into an ever-greater recourse to non-capitalist forms of plunder, that is, forms other than the extraction of surplus-value from wage-labor, from confiscation of communal property to privatization of welfare, which arise from capital’s encroachment on the commons, whether this be public property or pristine nature.

He argues that new imperialism is characterized by “a shift in emphasis from accumulation through expanded reproduction to accumulation through dispossession,” this now being “the primary contradiction to be confronted” (The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 176–77). Harvey is right to draw attention to the continuing and even increasing importance of old and new forms of accumulation by dispossession, but he does not recognize that imperialism’s most significant shift in emphasis is in an entirely different direction—toward the transformation of its own core processes of surplus-value extraction through the global labor arbitrage-driven globalization of production, a phenomenon that is entirely internal to the labor-capital relation.

Harvey’s Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2006; first published in 1982) has a deliberately ambiguous title. This book attempts to discover the limits to capital’s relentless advance, and also to identify the limitations of Capital, of Marx’s theory of capitalist development. Limits to Capital has far less to say about imperialism than Capital itself. In fact, imperialism receives just one brief, desultory mention (pp. 441-2): “Much of what passes for imperialism rests on the reality of exploitation of the peoples in one region by those in another…. The processes described allow the geographical production of surplus-value to diverge from its geographical distribution.” Instead of expanding on this important insight, it receives no further attention. Harvey returns to the subject of the geographical shift of production to low-wage countries in The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p. 165), where this is seen not as a sign of deepening imperialist exploitation, as is implied by his passing comment in Limits to Capital, but of its accelerated decline:

From the mid-1970s onwards … newly industrialising countries … began to make serious inroads into the markets for certain products (textiles, electronics, etc) in the advanced capitalist countries, and w[ere] soon joined by a host of other NICs [Newly Industrialising Countries, such as] Hungary, India, Egypt and those countries that had earlier pursued import substitution strategies (Brazil, Mexico)… Some of the power shifts since 1972 within the global political economy of advanced capitalism have been truly remarkable. United States dependence on foreign trade … doubled in the period 1973–80. Imports from developing countries increased almost tenfold.

This stands reality on its head: far from signifying a power shift toward low-wage countries, the growth of foreign trade reflects an enormous expansion of the power of imperialist TNCs over these countries—and of the increased dependence of these corporations on surplus-value extracted from their workers.

This conclusion is suggested by Harvey’s recognition, in the same work, of (p. 153) “the enhanced capacity of multinational capital to take Fordist mass production systems abroad, and there to exploit extremely vulnerable women’s labour power under conditions of extremely low pay and negligible job security.”

Furthermore, the global shift of production processes to low-wage nations was driven by TNCs in order to buttress their competitiveness and profitability, and to great effect, yet Harvey presents this as evidence of declining imperialist competitiveness. According to Harvey, core capital attempts to resolve its overaccumulation crisis through a spatial fix, involving the production of (p. 183) “new spaces within which capitalist production can proceed (through infrastructural investments, for example), the growth of trade and direct investments, and the exploration of new possibilities for the exploitation of labor-power.”

This is what Marx called a chaotic concept. Instead of the deliberate vagueness of exploration of new possibilities for the exploitation of labor-power, what about something much more straightforward like intensified exploitation of low-wage labor? In the end, Harvey’s attempts to add a spatial dimension to Marxist theory of capitalism falls flat because he neglects to discuss the spatial implications of immigration controls, of the deepening wage gradient between imperialist and semicolonial nations, of global wage arbitrage.

In The New Imperialism, published in 2003, Harvey devotes two pages to the globalization of production processes. He begins by inserting this development into his basic overaccumulation of capital thesis (pp. 63-4): “Easily exploited low-wage workforces coupled with increasing ease of geographical mobility of production opened up new opportunities for the profitable employment of surplus capital. But in short order this exacerbated the problem of surplus capital production world-wide.”

Formally separating industrial capitalists and financial capitalists, he ascribes the driving source of the outsourcing wave to the unleashed power of finance capitalists asserting their domination over manufacturing capital, to the great detriment of U.S. national interests (pp. 64-65):

A battery of technological and organisational shifts … promoted the kind of geographical mobility of manufacturing capital that the increasingly hyper-mobile financial capital could feed upon. While the shift towards financial power brought great direct benefits to the United States, the effects upon its own industrial structure were nothing short of traumatic, if not catastrophic…. Wave after wave of deindustrialisation hit industry after industry and region after region…. The US was complicit in undermining its dominance in manufacturing by unleashing the powers of finance throughout the globe. The benefit, however, was ever cheaper goods from elsewhere to fuel the endless consumerism to which the US was committed.

Leaving aside its nationalist and protectionist perspective, and its failure to notice that cheaper goods from elsewhere are made possible by cheaper labor elsewhere, that is, super-exploitation, Harvey’s argument contains a fatal flaw. Outsourcing was not so much driven by the awakening of finance but by stagnation and decline in the rate of manufacturing profit and the efforts of the captains of industry to counter this.

Increased imports of cheap manufactured goods did much more than fuel consumerism, it also directly supported the profitability and competitive position of North Americas industrial behemoths, and was actively promoted by them. Far from ending U.S. dominance—in other words, the ability of its corporations to capture the lion’s share of surplus-value—outsourcing has opened up new ways for U.S., European, and Japanese capitalists to entrench their dominance over global manufacturing production.

Harvey’s fundamental error only goes so far in explaining the dreadful reformism of his conclusion to The New Imperialism, where he pined (pp. 209–211) for “a return to a more benevolent New Deal imperialism, preferably arrived at through the sort of coalition of capitalist powers that Kautsky long ago envisaged…. [This] is surely enough to fight for in the present conjuncture,” forgetting what he wrote two decades earlier in his conclusion to Limits to Capital (p. 444): “The world was saved from the terrors of the Great Depression not by some glorious new deal or the magic touch of Keynesian economics in the treasuries of the world, but by the destruction and death of global war.”

John Smith received his PhD from the University of Sheffield and is currently self-employed as a researcher and writer. He was an oil rig worker, bus driver, and telecommunications engineer, and is a long-time activist in the anti-war and Latin American solidarity movements. Winner of the first Paul A. Baran–Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, John’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization. He can be contacted at johncsmith@btinternet.com.

This blogpost is a slightly extended version of David Harvey niega el imperialismo, Published published in Nuestra América XXI, número 14 (December 2017), itself this is an edited version of an edited version of A critique of David Harvey’s analysis of imperialism, published in August 2017 by MROnline.

Featured Photograph: Taken on 25 April 2012 by Tim Tregenza

Africa, the Agrarian Question and Radical Transformation

ROAPE

December 21, 2017

By Elisa Greco

Was the Russian revolution a peasants’ revolution? Appraising how fraught with problems is the creation of alliances between urban and rural struggles in most African countries and how pervasive these struggles are across the continent brings us back to the relevance of historical lessons such as the Russian revolution. Which agrarian politics are conducive to broader change? Why are the agrarian roots of the Arab springs so underestimated? Can intellectuals play a positive role?

At the ROAPE/TWN workshop in Ghana Elisa Greco, Max Ajl and Giuliano Martiniello discussed the interlocking of struggles against primitive accumulation and those against exploitation in the countryside in Tanzania, Uganda and Tunisia.

Panellists argued that African countries are not gearing towards structural transformation of their economy, but rather promoting an extractivist model. This classically sees a rapid growth of foreign investment in the mining, oil and gas sector geared towards exports to the world market. In addition to that, a similar pattern is observed in agriculture, which is structured (or re-structured) towards exports to the world market, which entrench primary commodity dependence. Whether this pattern will be steered towards Latin American variants of neo-extractivism – where rents are reinvested by the state into social service provision – or not can make a big difference in terms of social redistribution. But this does not change the nature of the model, which is not gearing towards radical structural transformation, rather perpetuating the extractivist project of pillaging poor, resource-rich countries. Agrarian questions in contemporary African countries are to be framed within this extractivist picture, as it affects the rural economy and rural working poor disproportionately because it is based on land enclosures.

This is why many social and political struggles by the working poor in the countryside in Tanzania and Uganda coalesce against the expropriation of land (see here and here). In all their diverse articulations, land struggles amount to resistance to primitive accumulation – the forceful and violent separation of producers from the means of production. These struggles are often weakened by the class dynamics of highly commodified rural societies, where capitalist farmers side with agribusiness against small farmers and landless farm workers (for more on this see here). Another element of weakness is their highly localised character. These two features stand against the unity of struggles on a wider national and regional level and often disperse their effectiveness.

Nonetheless the pervasiveness of social and political struggles points to the continued relevance of rural resistance in advanced capitalism. Primitive accumulation affects the rural working poor – both landed and landless – as much as does exploitation. Collective land claims exist in parallel with wildcat strikes by farm workers on rice and sugar plantations (see here), which often pay workers below the current rates in the local labour markets. Yet the working poor are forced into wage work, because rural economies often do not even guarantee mere survival, as testified by worsening living conditions in many rural areas in Uganda and Tanzania since the 1980s. Farming on a micro, small and middle scale in Uganda and Tanzania relies on extreme self-exploitation of farmers, who squeeze their own capacity to survive in order to keep going, and work double jobs to subsist, both on and off farms.

Panellists also observed that the current phase of financialised land grabs promotes a model of ‘agriculture without farmers’, often through mega-projects based on Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), like the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor in Tanzanian (SAGCOT) which has generated contestation against land expropriation (see here). SAGCOT shows the extent to which land grabs have been contested across the African continent and also provides an example of the reaction by agribusiness, which has led corporations and governments to revive and support contract farming schemes (see here). This old alternative to land expropriation is predicated on both exploitation and self-exploitation – without expropriation. At the same time, it avoids the socialisation of labour, and with it the potential for collective action.

Notably collective action of contract farmers is rare and not very effective, although farmers’ associations provide an organisational space for negotiating the terms of incorporation. Corporations can use contract farming schemes to pursue different ends, but ultimately tend to externalise risks onto small scale farmers and perpetuate adverse incorporation in the world market (see here). Rice and sugar have been key crops for both land grabs and contract farming scheme in Tanzania and Uganda. Both crops are water and labour intensive, with attached negative environmental and social patterns of overexploitation of land and water, and exploitation and self-exploitation of rural workers and farmers, with often disproportionate negative effects on women.

The lineages of the dispossessed and their multiple stories of struggles for land repossession are often undocumented and unreported. In the aftermath of a financialized global land rush, we are reminded of the nonlinear nature of dispossession and the non-teleological, non-stagist thrust of Karl Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation as a prolonged historical process that cannot occur without the active support of the state and the legal system.

Reporting the multitude of untold struggles would probably build a rather different social history of primitive accumulation – one marked by continuous attempts at land repossession. Uncovering and documented rural and urban struggles which often do not make the headlines is one of the many tasks of engaged activist-intellectuals. Analysing the contradictions internal to these struggles requires a ruthless analysis of their internal contradictions and often leads to pessimism, which requires a sustained optimism of the will.

Not only is the countryside a site of social and political struggles, but many national struggles of historical importance, such as those in North Africa and the Middle East, are firmly rooted in the agrarian question (see here). This is as true for East African countries as it is for Northern African countries and the Middle East. As documented in the case of Tunisia, where permanent unrest and daily strikes are very much a rural phenomenon, especially in oasis locations. In Tunisia, the question of seed sovereignty has been tackled by the state initiative of instituting a public National Gene Bank, which collects, protects and disseminates ancient and disappearing seeds and cultivar varieties all over the country. The often-contradictory ways in which the food question is being addressed in Tunisia underlines that the food question is a class and food sovereignty question. How to provide sufficient, good quality appropriate food for the majority of the population is central to political struggles both urban and rural.

The interventions in Accra on struggle, land and agrarian change converged on the assessment: there is a multitude of social struggles around food, land and water across different countries. Max Ajl discusses these matters further in this interview:

Giuliano Martiniello offers a candid discussion of the challenges of building strong social movements around the food question in African countries in this interview:

How to bridge urban and rural divides and create wider alliances is also discussed by Bettina Engels in this audio interview:

Bettina discusses the occurrence of riots and more organised trade union protests in Burkina Faso after the food price hikes following the global crisis in 2007/8 (also see here).

The questions and answers session reflected the multiple and often diverging positions on the nature and future direction of agrarian questions in Africa. Participants noted the persisting marginalisation of pastoralist groups and women in the discussion of agrarian questions. The role of the state in intensifying violence and political repression in rural areas was raised as a key issue for political action. While activists from Zimbabwe reflected on the crucial role of the worker-peasants alliance in the fast track land reform in Zimbabwe, stressing the aggressive international response against land reform, others from Ghana saw as problematic application of Latin American models of food sovereignty to African contexts, and argued that peasants are to be ‘sacrificed on the road to industrialisation’, proposing a second-international view on agrarian transitions as ‘making away with peasants’.

This clearly is not happening in Africa, where the demographic majority is dependent on land and farming – if in more diversified and fragmented ways than was the case until the structural adjustment programmes dismantled state support to farming throughout the 1980s. Closing remarks focused on the possibilities for auto-centered development at the national level, and how crucial rural-urban alliances among the working poor to create a strong political constituency are to this end.

Elisa Greco is a member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group and an expert on the political economy of food and agriculture in Africa. She is a Research Fellow in Agricultural Value Chains at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds.

Authoritarianism and Markets: Agricultural Reform in Rwanda

ROAPE

December 13, 2017

By Chris Huggins

Over the last decade, the Rwandan state has invested heavily in smallholder agriculture, resulting in improved national-level yields of key crops (particularly cereals) and improvements in national rates of nutrition and food security. The reform is a key part of Rwanda’s efforts to develop at the macroeconomic level, as well as to improve rural household incomes; it has increased agricultural productivity and aggregate food security, and has garnered international praise from donors, multilateral organizations, and some international NGOs. Compared to other low-income countries (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa), the commitment of the government to its own idea of ‘rural development’ is remarkable.

Nevertheless, a recent ROAPE blog provided evidence of some negative impacts of the agricultural reform, and several ROAPE articles have critiqued claims of success (see Ansoms et al. 2016 and Cioffo et al. 2016). A new book, Agricultural Reform in Rwanda: Authoritarianism, Markets and Zones of Governance, published by Zed Books in October, also critically examines the political economy of contemporary agricultural reform in Rwanda. Using the concept of authoritarian high modernism, this book examines in particular how the involvement of cooperatives, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private companies in the agricultural sector influences the processes of spatial and institutional homogenization, standardization and coercion associated with the current agricultural policies. In addition, noting that the Rwandan government’s attempts at strengthening and extending the reach of the state are entwined with processes of commodification and commercialization, it asks how discourses and practices of neoliberalism in the agricultural sector intersect with state efforts to mould ideas of citizenship, development and governance within specific geo-spatial contexts. I argue that James Scott’s framework in his 1998 book can be adapted through reference to critical political economy literature, particularly to refer to processes of accumulation by dispossession which are evident in some of the case studies.

Arguments

Rwanda’s reform should be viewed within a broader context of international aid. The book traces the nature of relations between the government of Rwanda and donor agencies, through a ‘global governmentality’ framework. Such a framework enables recognition that international systems of assessment of aid effectiveness and governance (linked to foreign investment decision-making, and hence commercialization of agriculture) require states like Rwanda to produce quantitative, aggregate data on policy implementation. Target-driven development approaches can lead to over-simplifications in design and evaluation and also encourage the use of compulsion to reach targets.

The incorporation of commercial and non-profit actors into the apparatus of rural development programming in Rwanda reinforces and extends the power of the state, rather than providing alternatives to state policies of homogenization, standardization and coercion. The book contends that the choice of crop types in the crop intensification programmes were at least partly motivated by a desire for profitability at higher levels of agricultural commodity chains, rather than at the level of the farming households.

The Rwandan state encourages farmers to become ‘modern’ and ‘professional’ through commercializing agriculture and embodying the neoliberal ideal of the self-governing, entrepreneurial individual. Discourses and practices associated with liberalism and neoliberalism in the agricultural sector are part of broader attempts by the Rwandan state to create a new kind of Rwandan citizen. Entrepreneurship, subjection to restrictive government policies and patriotic and reconciliatory ‘good citizenship’ are discursively intertwined. This generates various tensions and contradictions.

The Rwandan state has adapted neoliberal tools, such as the performance contract. The Rwandan imihigo performance contract system ensures that specific development targets are shared through a hierarchical structure of obligations from the level of the district, down to the household, and ultimately the Rwandan individual. Agricultural targets are often included in imihigo, which are largely imposed by the authorities (rather than the citizens signing the contract). The Rwandan state has tried to harness the imihigo structure for corporate interests.

Coercion, and state intervention more generally, is more explicit in some geo-spatial contexts than others. Certain areas can be identified in which the disciplinary aspects of governance are particularly evident, and where some technologies of governance are tailored to reduce the abilities of farmers to avoid integration into priority agricultural commodity chains. As such, these areas represent emerging zones of governance with particular characteristics, and demonstrate that the strategies of the state are not completely monolithic or uniform across Rwanda.

Case Studies

The book includes three in-depth case studies.

The first example is an agricultural cooperative in Musanze District, Northern Province, which was founded by an entrepreneur connected to the ruling party. The case study illustrates the ways in which private actors may use the same homogenizing technologies as the state while relying on particular ‘local’ dynamics to ensure their influence and control over agricultural institutions such as cooperatives. It is also an example of overt individual and collective resistance to a very powerful individual. The cooperative, which had not adequately paid farmers for their harvests, eventually collapsed due to local resistance.

Another case study examines whether the authoritarian nature of the pyrethrum sector in Musanze District has been altered by an apparent privatization of the state pyrethrum agency, and the investment of foreign capital and bilateral aid. As with other strategic crops, pyrethrum production is associated in local government discourse with patriotism and sacrifice for national development, and there are very clear links between discourses and practices of neoliberalism in the pyrethrum sector and state efforts to mould ideas of citizenship. The commercial firms and a bilateral aid agency, USAID, involved in the pyrethrum sector have coordinated to increase the level of coercion in the pyrethrum-producing zone, whilst simultaneously adopting some policies associated with governmental approaches.

The final case study describes the disciplinary and governmental approaches to enforcing maize policies in Kirehe District, Eastern Province. Whereas farmers often lose money growing maize (as it is not sufficiently drought-tolerant for the local agro-ecological conditions), commercialization of the maize sector in this District has involved new financial incentives for local authorities, who receive payments when fertilizer is purchased and correctly applied by farmers. This led to widespread coercion, as many farmers were forced by the authorities to buy fertilizer. Many farmers feel that their role, as citizen-producers within the contemporary Rwandan rural political economy, is reduced to that of a labour force, and have hence engaged in a number of covert strategies which go beyond ‘everyday forms of resistance’ and amount to radical reconfiguration of livelihood strategies.

Conclusion

The dynamics seen above suggest that the reform will accelerate economic differentiation amongst smallholders, a conclusion that has been suggested by other research. This raises the question of what will happen to smallholders who are forced to sell their land or are more generally forced out of the farming sector. Some supporters of the agricultural reform argue that short-term negative impacts experienced by smallholders may be a necessary price to pay in order for Rwanda to achieve economic growth and manage an agrarian transition in the medium to long term, through intensification and commodification of agriculture. ROAPE’s Graham Harrison argues that ‘the agrarian question is a troubled one, issuing in a politics of constraint, contingency and always (much to the chagrin of liberals) the politically devised allocation of hardship.’ Others, such as David Booth and Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, have been optimistic about the potentials of the reform.

One of my counter-arguments is that academics who focus primarily on macroeconomic and high-level political aspects fail to adequately account for the political economy of local-level governance. The data on coercion presented in this book complement other studies documenting the use of imposed land use changes and punishments. Despite this body of work, major reports on agricultural production in Rwanda fail to acknowledge the extent and significance of such strategies.

Harrison provides one of the most convincing defences of the Rwandan government’s approach; he summarizes contemporary rural development in Rwanda as ‘the interplay between three kinds of process: the promotion of improved agricultural productivity and peasant incomes; the inclusion of peasants in the “national project” through collective works, meetings, the provision of universal schooling and health insurance; and the penetration of rural communities by the market through contractualised and governed chain integration.’ However, this book problematizes each of these aspects, arguing that the promotion of improved agricultural productivity is not necessarily commensurate with increased ‘peasant incomes’. Secondly, that the inclusion of peasants in the ‘national project’ is also profoundly linked to attempts to make rural citizens compliant, and to tie them into systems of monitoring and discipline, which may limit their ability to make strategic decisions to improve their income; and finally, that the penetration of rural communities by the market paves the way for corporate profit-making under terms negotiated by the state, with smallholders often being instructed to take on the risks of growing commercial crops without a proven market.

Chris Huggins is an assistant professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottowa, an adjunct professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, and a non-resident research fellow at the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS).

All photographs were taken by Chris Huggins.

Photo Gallery: Accra, 13-14 November 2017

ROAPE

December 12, 2017

Pauline Vande-Pallen, Femi Aborisade and Peter Dwyer

This page displays images collected from the Accra workshop in November, 2017, taken by different participants. Among the participants from across the continent, Europe and North America were Elisa Greco, Ndongo Sylla, Alfred Zack-Williams, Biodun Olamosu, John Shola Magbadelo, Botti Isaac, Peter Adejobi, Deji Kolawole, Kunle Wizeman, Sola Olorunfemi, Andrew Emelize Uche, Adefolarin Olamilekan, Habuh-Rajan Suleiman, Fabiawari Batubo, Femi Aborisade, Lai Brown, Adefolarin Olamilekan, Akua Britwum, Bruno Sonko, Pauline Vande-Pallen, Tetteh Hormeku, Yao Graham, Gyekye Tanoh, Explo Nani-Kofi, Samantha Ashman, Sarah Nkuchia-Kyalo, Tony Moorsom, Ndongo Sylla, Ben Fine, Laura Mann, Ray Bush, Yao Graham, Peter Dwyer, Peter Lawrence, Tafadzwa Choto, Munyaradzi Gwisai, Bettina Engels, Habib Ayeb, Max Ajl, Hibist Kassa, Gordon Crawford, Giuliano Martiniello, Faisal Garba, Josephine Alabi.

**Akua Britwum, Sam Ashman and Gyekye Tanoh**

**Leo Zeilig, Biodun Olamosu and Peter Dwyer**

**Munyaradzi Gwisai, Habib Ayeb and Bettina Engels**

**Ray Bush, Ben Fine and Tetteh Hormeku**

**Alfred Zack-Williams and Elisa Greco**

**Josephine Alabi, Gordon Crawford and Giuliano Martiniello**

**Habib Ayeb, Bettina Engels and Ndongo Sylla**

**Gordon Crawford, Yao Graham and Hibist Kassa**

Debate Special Issue: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt

ROAPE

December 6, 2017

In this blogpost Cemal Burak Tansel and Brecht De Smet introduce a ROAPE Debate Special Issue on the Egyptian revolution. They discuss the ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and their relevance to revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa. The Special Issue, edited by Cemal Burak Tansel, brings together a range of leading researchers and activists to debate the process of revolution and counter-revolution, the agency of ‘the people’ and of the ruling classes in times of popular revolt. roape.net readers can access the articles for free by logging-in / registering here.

By Cemal Burak Tansel and Brecht De Smet

The financial crisis of 2008, the rise of right-wing ‘populism’ in Western Europe and the US, the Arab uprisings and new forms of local and global (intersectional) struggles indicate that the ‘neoliberal’ variant of capitalism is at a crossroads. The financial meltdown has revealed the structural instabilities of deregulated capital flows, while the tendency toward increased authoritarianism and obsession with security shows the limits of the institutions of bourgeois democracy to absorb mass discontent. At the same time, episodes such as the ‘Arab Spring’ sharply state the relevance of categories such as revolution and counter-revolution for the 21st century. The revolutionary uprisings, first in Tunisia and then in regional heavyweight Egypt, reinvigorated mass emancipatory politics throughout the Middle East and the world at large. Movements such as Indignados, Occupy Wall Street and Gezi Park protests in Turkey were directly inspired by the apparent success of the Tahrir occupation, which offered a powerful, contemporary form of popular revolution. Tahrir came to represent the potential for a global rupture of capitalism.

Yet by the end of 2013 the outcomes of the Egyptian uprising had already proved disappointing. The military, bureaucratic, and security elites from the Mubarak era—the so-called ‘deep state’—were able to hold onto state power. Despite the fall of a dictator, the political and economic structures remained unchanged. After two years the counter-revolution was successful, not despite the mobilisation of the masses, but because of it. The current strongman, president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, came to power through a clever and agile appropriation of the grassroots Tamarod (Rebel) campaign, which rallied hundreds of thousands, if not millions of ordinary Egyptians in the streets.

The Egyptian experience raises fundamental questions about the process of revolution and counter-revolution, about the agency of ‘the people’ and of the ruling classes in times of revolt, and about the nature of state power in an era of global crisis. In our Debate Special Issue: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Egypt, we address these issues through an extensive engagement with the thought of Antonio Gramsci and recent contributions to the literature on contemporary Egypt, Marxist theory and the broader questions of development, emancipation and revolutionary political practice. While the contributions to the symposium focus largely on Brecht de Smet’s book Gramsci on Tahrir, the approach and key arguments of the book are also contrasted with relevant contemporary texts, such as Gilbert Achcar’s The People Want, Maha Abdelrahman’s Egypt’s Long Revolution and Anne Alexander and Mostafa Bassiouny’s Bread, Freedom, Social Justice. The symposium thus aims not only to assess the recent scholarship on the Egyptian revolution, but also to contextualise the theoretical and political questions posed by the book and their relevance to the wider Global South-oriented interdisciplinary debates.

A central figure and conceptual resource that cross-cuts all contributions in the symposium is Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Gramsci has been one of the most influential Marxist thinkers and his ideas have been appropriated by different disciplines within the critical social sciences, ranging from political theory, postcolonial and cultural studies to international political economy. Due to the fragmentary nature of his main writings collected in the Prison Notebooks, his thought has been interpreted in varying and even contradictory ways, leading to the emergence of what Roberto Roccu called a ‘prêt-à-porter version of Gramsci.’ For some, the figure of Gramsci has become a hand puppet, mouthing scholars’ own theories through the open text of the Prison Notebooks. For example, Perry Anderson and Alex Callinicos have argued that contradictory interpretations of the notions of respectively hegemony and passive revolution arise directly from inconsistencies and ‘concept-stretching’ within the Prison Notebooks themselves. Nevertheless, Gramsci indicates that there is a coherent leitmotiv or ‘rhythm of thought’ operating throughout the Prison Notebooks that transcends its scattered character. In the past decade new scholarship such as Adam David Morton’s Unravelling Gramsci and Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment has reasserted not only the internal consistency of Gramsci’s thought, but also its relevance for our understandings of crisis, struggle, and transformation within contemporary global capitalism. Gramsci on Tahrir inscribes itself within this tradition, critically deploying Gramsci’s ideas to comprehend the process of revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt and its relation to the broad historical development of capitalism. Conversely, the Egyptian experience serves as an interlocutor of Gramsci’s ideas.

De Smet defends the necessity for permanent revolution by arguing that the idea of a purely democratic transformation of the régime on a (neoliberal) capitalist base is deeply flawed. Drawing on the concept of uneven and combined development De Smet combines the insights of Achcar’s The People Want and Hanieh’s Lineages of Revolt. Achcar’s point of departure is the particularity of the region, and especially its long history of ‘fettered development’ which leads him to emphasise the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) specific political and economic trajectory, a trajectory defined by state of permanent crisis. For Achcar the ‘peculiar modality’ of capitalism in the MENA is the patrimonial rentier state and neoliberalism merely represents a new layer of oppression and exploitation to this historical set-up, channeling public resources more decisively in the hands of a select group of oligarchs. Hanieh, on the other hand, examines the Egyptian case from a decisively global perspective and takes into account the internationalisation of capital, class, and state and—following Lenin—the role of imperialism as a geopolitical, military, and economic force. Hanieh points toward the convergence of different fractions of capital, highlighting the connection between global, regional, and national ebbs and flows of accumulation. In Hanieh’s account, instead of representing a new layer on top of an existing regime, neoliberal accumulation is understood as a process that has fundamentally restructured the nature of state and class in the region—and in the Global South in general. De Smet integrates both perspectives by embedding Egypt’s particular trajectory within the world-historical process of uneven and combined global capitalist development, crisis, and (passive-) revolutionary transformation. This view allows him to explore populist and authoritarian tendencies in the West as well, which are understood as varying articulations of a general crisis of neoliberal accumulation and hegemony in line with the emergent scholarship on authoritarian neoliberalism.

Gramsci on Tahrir positions itself within the existing literature on the Egyptian revolution among those works that are sympathetic to the emancipatory movement of workers, peasants, women, the urban poor, and other subaltern groups. Instead of evaluating the revolutionary process merely on the basis of its outcomes, De Smet insists on understanding the revolution as a process of class and popular subject formation, intersected by ruling classes’ strategies of repression, deflection, and cooptation.

Roberto Roccu’s contribution to the Special Issue considerably expands De Smet’s take on subaltern subject formation, questioning the possibility of a broad alliance between subaltern actors in the Egyptian context. The book’s conceptual infrastructure, in which concepts such as passive revolution function as exploratory searchlights to reveal tendencies within the process of revolution and counter-revolution, has been a contested topic of debate. In addition the contributions of Anne Alexander and Sameh Naguib and Cemal Burak Tansel in the Special Issue critically engage with De Smet’s understanding and deployment of passive revolution and Caesarism, drawing on their extensive knowledge of, respectively, the Egyptian and Ottoman/Turkish historical trajectories. Both the innovative ideas formulated in Gramsci on Tahrir and their criticisms offer an important contribution to the studies of revolution and restoration.

The book and our individual contributions in this ROAPE Debate Special Issue emphasise the importance of understanding the ‘Arab Spring’ as a long-term process of revolution and counter-revolution within a broader political-geographical and historical context. This is also the approach taken by Sara Salem in the issue. Salem critically explores De Smet’s use of the concept of passive revolution through an insightful discussion of the continuities and discontinuities within Egypt’s modern trajectory of socio-economic development and state formation. The Special Issue is concluded by a detailed rejoinder by De Smet, which addresses the issues raised by the contributors and restates the significance of utilising Marxist methodologies in studying socio-economic and political change in the peripheries of global capitalism.

Notwithstanding certain differences in our conceptual and political analyses, we hope that the ROAPE Debate Special Issue will be read as a demonstration of the vibrancy of Marxist approaches. Egypt’s revolutionary upheaval might have been swallowed by the authoritarian restoration of its ancien régime, but the struggles to build on and realise the emancipatory lessons of Tahrir continue. We present this Special Issue as a modest contribution to support those efforts.

Cemal Burak Tansel is Lecturer in International Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. Brecht De Smet is a Post-doctoral Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University.

Featured photograph: Egyptian revolution (Day 16) 9 February, 2011.

Capitalism: A Moving Target for Radical Political Economy

ROAPE

November 29, 2017

Insights from ROAPE-TWN conference in Accra, Ghana, November 2017

By Laura Mann

Recently the Review of African Political Economy teamed up with Third World Network in Accra, Ghana to host a three day workshop on critical political economy and structural transformation in Africa today. This event was the first of a series that ROAPE will be co-organising over the course of the next year, with a second workshop scheduled in Dar Es Salaam in April 2018 and a final one in Johannesburg in September 2018. In the coming weeks, we will be publishing presentations, translations, blogposts and interviews with participants from our first workshop. In this blogpost, I want to focus on what I feel were the three most important insights to come out of discussions in Accra:

ONE: Capitalism is a moving target and in its current globalised and financialised form, it has a tendency to extract value not just from labour but from the broader long-term health of host economies, making societies the world over profoundly troubled. Peter Lawrence described the global economy as a global casino while Munyaradzi Gwisai reminded us that in the midst of waves of deindustrialisation and attacks on working conditions, capitalists are making unprecedented profits. In more concrete terms, Samantha Ashman argued that the current crisis of steel production in South Africa is intimately tied to the global financial system as firms have been allowed to drain value out of the industry in pursuit of short-term financial yields. She commented that it is not just a problem of capital flight, but capital strike, as firms refuse to reinvest their profits back into the industry. Thus amidst the ever present message of financial inclusion, African economies are seeing their capital flow outwards. Tetteh Hormeku likewise commented that in a so called free trade system, intellectual property agreements like TRIPS no longer encourage innovation and technological advances to drive productivity growth but rather serve to solidify knowledge rents and the monopolisation of knowledge.

Put simply, it would appear that in our current wave of globalised, financialised capitalism, profit has become rather worryingly delinked from productivity, and that it is extremely unclear how societies will climb out of this mess without either a great deal of pain and popular revolt or a radical re-imagining of our economic models. As Yao Graham commented, “in context of deindustrialisation and falling productivity in agriculture, people have lost faith in democracy.” Samantha Ashman similarly commented that perhaps the term ‘late capitalism’ means that it will soon be over. Yet even in relatively prosperous parts of the world, we are witnessing the political impacts of long-term declines in productivity, dwindling private (and public) investment and widening economic inequality, and it is not clear whether societies will weather the storm so easily. Within African countries, this extractive logic sits within an even harsher context of a highly competitive global division of labour and a neo-colonial governance framework that limits policy space and fiscal sovereignty.

While it is true that there has been a revival of interest in industrial policy among heterodox economists and even some within institutions like the IMF have begun to acknowledge the weaknesses of their former policies, our workshop participants like Charles Abugre and Ben Fine stressed that current conceptualisations of industrial policy still fail to grapple with the challenges presented by financialisation and globalisation and pay too little attention to the relative fortunes of capital and labour within current state-led models of growth. Industrial policy is a class project, and without acknowledging the need for redistribution as part of that project, researchers are advocating for exploitative frameworks.

In such circumstances, Akua Britwum commented, it is imperative that activists and trade unions move beyond immediate workplace concerns and venture into broader debates about what industrial, trade and social policies should look like in their societies. For this reason, our workshop tried to bring such activists into conversations with critical academics about growth and developmental policy. Importantly, as so many participants made clear, these different aspects of policy all depend on and feed off one another, making policy space and fiscal sovereignty all the more important for policy-makers seeking to think and craft their way out of extractive economic models.

TWO: Neoliberalism is not really a manifestation of weak or rolled back states but rather a particular kind of state role that has been defined and hijacked by special interests. In so many presentations, we saw evidence of the state’s role in constructing the neoliberal order; Ben Fine discussed the state’s role in terms of the development of financial industries and Public-Private Partnerships, Gordon Crawford discussed the role of the state in the globalisation of Ghana’s mining sector, and Tetteh Hormeuku highlighted the role of the state in the enforcement of the TRIPS agreement. Far from acting like a night watchman, the state is present and interventionist in these restructuring processes. Clearly however, it is serving a particularly narrow set of interests that profit from the extraction process. In this vein, Yao Graham argued that only forms of public ownership and strong public interest will allow African economies to significantly transform the way that industries like agriculture and mining work for African development. Equally Ben Fine argued that industrial policy works most effectively when it has the room to redraw the boundaries of trade acceptability. When we uncover the work of the state in extraction, we make it easier to promote a state gunning for development in its place.

THREE: We need to change the story about competitiveness and sustainability. There has been an appropriation of the term ‘sustainability’ by financial interests. The term no longer serves to protect social or environmental resources or rights but rather to define sustainability in terms of profitability. We are constantly asked whether a particular service or programme can be sustained without donor funding or public money. Similarly, there is a pervasive narrative about the need for ‘patient labour’ in the context of competition across nations. Yet at the same time, capital can apparently no longer afford to be patient given the high profits to be made in the here and now. Thus we are told that wage levels are too high or that long-term investment into health, learning and infrastructure are too dear. These stories make it difficult for any long-term vision of development to emerge and compete against short-term profit-making and force workers, their trade unions and the public purses into tight fiscal corners.

A kind of informalisation from above has been sprung upon labour markets and public coffers. Business models have emerged to justify and re-order the transfer of surplus away from workers and citizens towards capital through public-private partnerships, outgrower schemes, bottom of the pyramid business models, cooperatives (but without the voting rights) and other informal-formalisation models, all of which serve to squeeze profits out of our economic institutions. Yet this myth about sustainability through profitability does not offer people security or wage growth in return. As discussed above, this transfer is not based on economic fundamentals. We are left with accumulation without growth or redistribution; accumulation merely for private consumption. It should be clear that if we keep focusing on financial sustainability, our economies and societies will simply not survive. They will suffocate. Sustainability must be understood in terms of productivity and redistribution once more. Economies are ONLY sustainable when there is a long-term and socially inclusive models of growth.

In agriculture, Elisa Greco thus called on researchers to closely scrutinise the narratives of those who claim that they are developing productive capabilities but embody extractive logics when it comes to their labour relations. Here she was referring specifically to the case of the Nigerian conglomerate Dangote’s recent move into agro-processing and agriculture. Hibist Kassa cautioned that in the context of artisanal mining in South Africa, formalisation of the industry often results in criminalisation due to licensing laws, thereby pushing the poor further into poverty. In my own work on digital platforms, formalisation and automation often results in a concentration of capital and data away from the poor and towards the well financialised controllers of digital platforms. This tightening strategy is suicidal for if you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be able to buy and sustain growth into the future.

As Akua Britwum reminded us, this approach of suffocating labour through depressed wages also stands in stark contrast to the approach taken in the independence era when workers were seen as consumers within growing domestic markets. As Charles Abugre optimistically pointed out, that while in the past African policy-makers had the policy space to engage in Import Substitution Industrialisation, it was actually much more challenging to do so with small rural African populations. Today that context has changed and it may be possible once more to craft domestically oriented and integrated industrial, trade and social policies, which do not depend on disadvantageous positions within a global division of labour. As Ray Bush commented, academics must do their bit in this process by tying in notions of social justice and harmony into technical definitions of economic transformation. African countries, like every other country in the world, need to invest in their futures through social policies, learning and domestic R&D to bolster long-term growth and shared prosperity. As Charles Abugre so finely put it, a “key area of value addition in any industrial strategy should be value addition in the brain”. To that end, we hope our workshops will move forward.

Laura Mann is a member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group and a sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of markets and new information and communication technologies in Africa. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Featured photograph Hibist Kassa and Yao Graham. First photograph Akua Britwum, Sam Ashman, Gyekye Tanoh and Peter Lawrence; second photograph Ray Bush.

From Junta to Popular Protest: Zimbabwe at the Crossroads

ROAPE

November 24, 2017

Popular Protest, Social Movements and Class Struggle (Issue 11)

By David Seddon

In the last issue, I looked at Togo, where popular protests broke out in August 2017 against President Faure Gnassingbé, whose father Etienne Eyadéma Gnassingbé, was (until his death in 2005) the longest serving president in Africa. In this issue, I return to consider the situation in one country we have already discussed on several occasions, but where the President has at last come to the end of his long 37 year period in office – Zimbabwe.

The Crisis in Zimbabwe

In previous issues we have examined the dynamics of political struggle in Zimbabwe and in issue 8 we noted that popular protest increased significantly during 2016 at the same time as the economy continued to deteriorate.

The Economic Crisis

Thirty-seven years ago, Robert Mugabe inherited a well-diversified economy with potential to become one of sub-Saharan Africa’s best performers. Today, Zimbabwe is the region’s crisis point, with real per capita incomes down 15 per cent since 1980. The queues to withdraw precious dollars from ATMs just hours after the army’s intervention on 15 November 2017 were just the latest illustration of a need for hard currency, reflecting grinding economic difficulties that go back years.

Although in the early days after independence the Mugabe government was theoretically committed to Marxism-Leninism, it never paid more than lip service to the concept. It did, however, set up a plethora of state-owned enterprises.

By the early 1990s, in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its empire, the regime was shoe-horned by the IMF, the World Bank and western donors into a poorly designed and ineptly managed structural adjustment programme. Its designers believed that market and financial liberalization, plus civil service and public enterprise reform, would drive economic growth, with manufacturing as the lead sector. Many of the public sector reforms were stillborn, however, and de-industrialization accelerated. Industrial output today is less than 10 per cent of GDP, against a peak in the early 1990s of 25 per cent.

Far from stimulating the economy as the donors and multilateral institutions promised, market reforms deepened the economic crisis, forcing Mugabe into ever more desperate measures. These included unbudgeted payouts to ‘war veterans’, compounded by Zimbabwe’s military foray into the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998 to support the Kabila dynasty. Together, they helped precipitate the slide into currency collapse and hyperinflation of the early 2000s.

The ‘war veterans’, encouraged by the regime which used them as a political vigilante force to implement some of its policies and to terrorize any opposition, were the vanguard of the chaotic land redistribution policy launched in 2000, ahead of elections in which many analysts insist Morgan Tsvangirai’s reformist Movement for Democratic Change won the vote but lost the count.

To shore-up its rural support base the Mugabe government adopted a populist approach, playing to ZANU-PF’s historical strengths as a radical nationalist movement. It launched a programme of compulsory land acquisition and occupations of largely white-owned farms. Yet land reform accelerated economic decline exponentially with much of the redistributed land going to party cronies, while poorer farmers were deprived of the seeds, fertilizers and machinery necessary to make the land productive. As a consequence farm production collapsed and by 2008 output volumes were two-thirds below their peak levels in 2000. Real GDP plunged 45 per cent in the decade to 2009.

In 2009, Zimbabwe was forced to abandon its currency — which had gone up in an inferno of hyperinflation — and to adopt the dollar as its principal means of exchange. The enforced dollarization stabilized the economy and led to an initial 40 per cent rebound in incomes, though these have since flat-lined.

With no local currency, money supply became entirely dependent on inflows of dollars, in effect depriving the authorities of control over monetary policy. In a desperate measure to introduce liquidity, the government introduced ‘bond notes’ in 2016. These were theoretically backed by hard currency but quickly deteriorated in value.

In the meanwhile, the underlying economic situation continued to deteriorate. In October 2016, the World Bank issued a report on Zimbabwe in which it stated that the economy was estimated to have grown by only 0.4 per cent in 2016, with agriculture having shrunk by 4.2 per cent, in part due to drought. There was concern that external payment arrears might lead to a further contraction in imports and a decline in GDP. In spite of export subsidies of $175m, the trade deficit now exceeds 10 per cent of GDP.

Non-farm employment at about 850,000 is unchanged from the late 1980s, but the number of industrial jobs has fallen over the decades from more than 200,000 to 90,000. Today, the public sector, excluding the military — mostly teachers, health workers and civil servants — accounts for more than 40 per cent of formal employment. Wages are low and often unpaid for months.

Money supply surged 36 per cent in 2016-2017 and the ‘bond notes’ plunged 80 per cent on the parallel market, threatening yet higher inflation. Already, at annualized rates, inflation is currently running at more than 14 per cent and the budget deficit is 12 per cent of GDP. The financial crisis continued to have a significant impact on incomes, while the drought of 2016 disproportionately affected the rural poor: the number of extremely poor people is expected to have increased from 3.16 million in 2015 to 3.28 million in 2016. Moreover, the number of food insecure people was considered likely to increase to over 4.4 million people by end 2016/early 2017.

The Political Crisis

In Issue 8, we examined the role of the Tajamuka and ThisFlag campaigns as examples of popular movements of civil society that have protested repeatedly against the government, its handling of the economy and its repression of opposition, both on the street and online.

ThisFlag has functioned as an avenue by which ordinary Zimbabweans can demonstrate their grievances against the government, with the group’s leader, Pastor Evan Mawarire, calling for Zimbabweans to engage in passive strikes and stay-aways to make their voices heard (ACLED Conflict Trends, September 2016). In contrast, the Tajamuka campaign was focused on forcing Mugabe to step down before the 2018 elections and became engaged in active protests and riots in Harare and Bulawayo. Protesting alongside these social movements was the National Vendors Union of Zimbabwe (NAVUZ) which also demanded an end to Mugabe’s administration and many other civil society organizations and associations.

In the face of these civil society developments, the conventional opposition parties had become increasingly concerned about losing relevance as the vehicle for anti-Mugabe sentiment. They therefore formed an alliance and also engaged in widespread protest against the government. This alliance included notable former regime insiders and opposition politicians as well as Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change–Tsvangirai (MDC-T), former Vice-President Joice Mujuru’s Zimbabwe People First (PF) party, Tendai Biti’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Elton Mangoma’s Renewal Democrats of Zimbabwe (RDZ).

There was also evidence of increasing tension and factionalism within the ruling ZANU-PF as Robert Mugabe appeared to favour his wife Grace as his successor, and she gave all the signs of being prepared to step into his shoes. Grace Mugabe — 41 years younger than her husband — was once dismissed as a lightweight shopping addict. But she had become increasingly active in public life in recent years. Her ambitions were backed by the so-called G40, a group of young supporters that had earned a reputation for aggression, but also including some ZANU PF ministers.

Born in South Africa, Grace was one of Mugabe’s secretaries when their affair began in 1987, and they had two children in secret before the president’s wife died in 1992. The couple married at a lavish ceremony in 1996 attended by Nelson Mandela, before having a third child. Grace was awarded a doctorate by the University of Zimbabwe, where her husband is chancellor, reportedly just three months after enrolling, and in 2014 became the head of the ZANU-PF party’s women’s wing.

She showed her political mettle in 2014 with her campaign against then-vice president Joice Mujuru, who was a contender to succeed her husband. Grace launched sustained verbal attacks against Mujuru, accusing her of plotting to topple the president. Soon afterwards, Mujuru was ousted and later expelled from the ruling ZANU-PF party. Her confrontational approach and distant public image brought her little popular affection in Zimbabwe, but her supporters sought to popularize nicknames for her, like “Dr Amai (Doctor Mother)” and “Queen of Queens”.

Over the last year or so, she had become a real contender for the presidency. This increased the tension at the top of ZANU-PF to the point where, eventually, in November 2017, a crisis point was evidently reached.

Crisis Point

In September 2017, a study by Research Advocacy Unit (RAU), titled ‘Zimbabwe since the elections in July 2013: The view from 2017’, noted a pattern of violence and intimidation under President Robert Mugabe. But when the crisis that many had predicted over the previous year or so eventually came, it was not in the form of a popular uprising against the endemic repression, violence and intimidation, or a concerted assault on the political dominance of ZANU PF by the ‘democratic forces’ and the political opposition, but as a direct result of infighting within the ZANU PF leadership over the succession to the presidency.

On 10 October 2017, the Daily News published a major – and remarkably prescient – article under the heading: ‘ZANU-PF Infighting Risks Unrest, Instability’. It went on to report that ‘a respected think-tank’ had warned that ‘in-fighting at the top of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF Party is spreading to elements of the bureaucracy and security establishment, and the harsh words being exchanged and the absence of democratic politics risk provoking a backlash that could bring great political instability and incidents of sporadic unrest’.

With the two Vice Presidents at each other’s throats and First Lady Grace Mugabe now targeting Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, in a succession free-for-all. the conflict at the top of ZANU PF was now also spreading to the military and the security apparatus, posing ‘a significant stability threat’.

There was increasing concern among many of the ZANU-PF leadership and also, it became apparent in November 2017, the army, that Grace Mugabe would be appointed as vice president at the ZANU-PF party congress in December. Arguably, it was the sacking of Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa by Robert Mugabe – which appeared to support her ambitions – that prompted the military intervention on Tuesday 14 and Wednesday 15 November 2017.

With the advantage of hindsight, Shadrack Gutto, director of the Centre for African Renaissance Studies at the University of South Africa, told AFP on 21 November that ‘the crisis has been triggered by Grace because she wanted to grab power and to have Mugabe remove a lot of people. She over-reached herself. She has done a lot to accelerate the removal of her husband from power. The military decided that enough is enough.”

It is significant that not only was Grace Mugabe effectively sidelined by the army intervention but her supporters in the G40 were explicitly targeted by the military officers who announced on state TV in the early hours of Wednesday that they would bring the ‘criminals’ supporting the Mugabes to justice.

The Coup that was not a Coup

At night on 14 November 2017, the military seized the radio and television operations of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) and by the next morning the world woke up to the news that the top officers of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) had intervened to place President Robert Mugabe in custody. An army spokesman, Major General Sibusiso Busi Moyo, read a statement in the middle of the night which claimed that the intervention was not a military takeover of government but was designed to respond effectively to ‘a degenerating political, social and economic situation in our country which, if not addressed, may result in violent conflict’.

General Moyo explained that President Mugabe was being detained for his own protection and the military were ‘only targeting criminals around him who are committing crimes that are causing social and economic suffering in the country’. By the end of the day, Robert Mugabe was said to be under house arrest and his wife Grace Mugabe was said to have fled the country, perhaps to Namibia; also some former ministers had been arrested, and the former Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom Mugabe had sacked at Grace’s instigation only a few days before, was nominated by the remaining ZANU-PF leadership to be acting or interim president.

Civil society organizations asked the military to ensure restoration of the constitutional order and an inclusive process to resolve ‘Zimbabwe’s political and socio-economic problems’. These organizations that signed the press release numbered 115 in all and ranged widely across the spectrum of civil society, including women’s groups, church organizations, youth groups, community associations, human rights groups, and trade and professional associations.

They called for ‘the peaceful and constitutional resolution of the situation’ and an ‘immediate return of Constitutional order and democracy in Zimbabwe’. They expressed the view that ‘the solution to Zimbabwe’s socio economic and political problems should be a product of an inclusive all stakeholder process’, thereby staking an important claim to involvement in any kind of ‘settlement’. They called for President Mugabe to step down and ‘pave the way for an inclusive, all stakeholder process to determine the future of Zimbabwe’. They ‘implored’ the Zimbabwe Defence Forces to uphold, defend and respect the Constitution, and ‘demanded’ that they issue a clear and quickly implementable roadmap to restoring constitutional order in Zimbabwe. They also called on the Parliament of Zimbabwe ‘to uphold and fulfil their constitutional obligations by: i) Creating conditions for the swift realignment of key laws to the constitution including the Electoral Act paving way for the conduct of credible free and fair election in 2018; ii) Repealing legislation that they considered diluted progressive provisions of the constitutions, such as the Cyber-Security Act; iii) Immediately discarding Constitutional Amendment Bill No.1 of 2017 to safeguard the independence of the judiciary; iv) Restoring citizens freedoms of assembly and speech by amending restrictive laws such as the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA); v) Liberalizing the media space; and vi) Ensuring civil servants’ neutrality in the political processes in line with the Constitution.

Clearly these civil society organizations were concerned that the army’s intervention and control of the political situation would be prolonged and effectively constitute a military coup; they were also concerned that any regime that follows the departure of Robert Mugabe as President might prove to be little different – apart from a change of President and shift in the balance of political forces among the top echelons of the ZANU-PF.

The war veterans, who have in the past often been the most loyal supporters of President Mugabe, also made it clear that they believe he should now go, and called for him to be impeached. Some, like War Veterans Association Chair, Christopher Mutsvangwa, even called on South African President Zuma as Chair of the regional body SADC to speed up the process: ‘we want to see the back of Mugabe’, he said.

The party elite of ZANU-PF met at once to discuss the situation and it rapidly became clear that those present (some of Mugabe’s supporters were not able to participate because they had been arrested) were unanimous in wanting the President to step down. He was officially removed from his position as Party leader, at a special session of the ruling party’s central committee, to be replaced by his former trusted lieutenant former Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom he had sacked only the previous week.

Mass Protests

Over the weekend of 18-19 November, there were mass demonstrations as tens of thousands of people came onto the streets of Harare and other major towns across Zimbabwe to celebrate what appeared to be the end of Mugabe’s 37 year long period in office, ripping down images of Mr Mugabe and brandishing signs calling for his wife, Grace, to be expelled from the ruling party. CNN News reported on Monday 20 November that ‘hundreds of thousands’ had come onto the streets, giving a popular endorsement of the action by the military, but also noted that ‘armored vehicles manned by soldiers were still stationed on some street corners’.

On Sunday evening, 19 November, Robert Mugabe addressed the nation on television. He was expected, and had clearly been asked by his military ‘minders’ – who were present with him in the TV studio – to present his resignation. To almost everyone’s surprise, however, and to the evident consternation of the army officers present but off- camera behind him, instead of resigning, he embarked on a long and rambling speech, recognizing ‘that many developments have occurred in the party, given the failings of the past, and anger they might have triggered in some quarters’, but pledging to remain in office to undertake reforms. He even intimated that he planned to preside over ZANU-PF’s extra-ordinary congress scheduled for December 12-17. Moments after Mugabe’s address, war veterans’ leader Chris Mutsvangwa said he would lead public protests in the streets of Harare to call for his resignation or dismissal. Two senior government sources told Reuters late on Sunday night that Mugabe had agreed to resign but they did not know details of his departure. Whether this was the case or not, external pressures began to build. Representatives from South Africa had already travelled to Zimbabwe and on Monday 20 November, Zambian President Edgar Lungu sent former president Kenneth Kaunda (also 93 years old, like Mugabe) to Harare to try to convince Robert Mugabe to step down in a ‘dignified exit’.

Internal pressure also began to rise as the ZANU-PF deadline of noon on Monday 20 November for Mugabe’s resignation passed. All ZANU-PF MPs were called together to Party headquarters to discuss the proposal for Mugabe’s impeachment. In the meanwhile, Mugabe, apparently unrepentant and reluctant to step aside as requested, apparently met with his Cabinet, suggesting that he might not be prepared to concede his position as President of the Republic of Zimbabwe even under extreme pressure. There was even speculation that he envisaged himself remaining in post at least until the December Party Congress.

On Tuesday afternoon, however, as Parliament met to initiate impeachment proceedings, a short letter was sent which was read out by the Speaker. It confirmed that Robert Mugabe had, at last, resigned as President of Zimbabwe.

Short Term Reaction, Longer Term Future

The reaction from the public was immediate and almost universally joyful. There were celebrations from the crowds in the streets, and it seemed clear that, whatever their status or political persuasion, the people of Zimbabwe were pleased to see ‘the old man’ go, and looked forward to a new era of change. Precisely what change there will be remains less clear.

The military that intervened in ‘a coup that was not a coup’, in mid-November 2017, presented itself throughout as merely facilitating a change of leadership, but the army has been less forthcoming as to its own anticipated future role. In a press release the Zimbabwe Defense Forces emphasized that it had the support of the business community and said it wanted to create ‘a peaceful, united investor-friendly and prosperous Zimbabwe’. It is not at all clear yet how far the army is prepared to pass the reins of government back to ZANU-PF, even if headed by a new leader.

Emmerson Mnangagwa, the sacked vice-president of ZANU-PF, who is Mr Mugabe’s most likely successor, and is now the interim President and acting leader of ZANU-PF, is clearly ambitious, and unlikely to cede power easily. He has worked behind the scenes over the last few months to support the aborted Lima process, through which the government had hoped to clear up longstanding debt arrears, opening the way to new multilateral funds and, potentially, more foreign investment – but to many was seen as a further and devastating structural adjustment programme.

It is most likely that he will at least be the ‘face’ of the new government; but whether he will be able to maintain his position and continue to lead what has been in many ways a one-party state through the dominance of the ZANU-PF, remains to be seen. The December Congress of the Party will be decisive in either consolidating his position or undermining it.

The role of the veterans’ association, which moved decisively against Robert Mugabe over the last two weeks, also remains to be seen.

The political opposition clearly hopes that it will be possible for Zimbabwe to return to genuine multi-party politics and that the period before the forthcoming elections will give an opportunity for open and democratic debate, and for the rights of assembly and the expression of different political views to be upheld.

Finally, the many elements of civil society hope for an opportunity to express their demands for a new direction for Zimbabwe’s political, social and economic trajectory in an atmosphere of openness and optimism.

No doubt, the country will be inundated with offers of ‘rescue packages’, from a variety of international donors and companies. Given the devastating impact since 1980 of these external loans and debts on Zimbabwe’s development, such interventions should be resisted in favour of a more self-reliant strategy for sustainable development. This, however, is unlikely to happen. Tendai Biti, for example, the former socialist lawyer and leading MDC politician, who was finance minister from 2009 to 2013, has suggested that the economy could quickly recover if it could attract foreign investment and reinsert itself into the international economy: ‘look at the way we bounced back in the government of national unity’, he said, referring to the recovery from hyperinflation after 2009. ‘We can build a $100bn economy in under 15 years and have a growth rate of 7 per cent per annum’.

Others, however, have already expressed a preference for a more self-reliant road to economic recovery and will be wary of once again subjecting Zimbabwe to foreign development agencies, banks and vested interests. The University of Zimbabwe academic and lawyer, Munyaradzi Gwisai, has put forward another vision for the country, ‘we need a new radical anti-capitalist mass alternative to take on this rejuvenated junta. The new leadership has shed radical economic nationalism for naked IMF-backed neoliberalism under an authoritarian state.’

For the moment, however, the ordinary people of Zimbabwe, who have experienced decades of repression and hardship, are rejoicing and are optimistic; very soon, however – indeed even as this is being written – there will be a renewed struggle for the future of Zimbabwe.

David Seddon (criticalfaculty1@hotmail.co.uk) is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.

Making Connections: Radical Transformation in Africa

ROAPE

November 22, 2017

Accra, November 13-14 November 2017

At last week’s ROAPE and TWN (Third World Network Africa) workshop in Accra, sixty activists and activist-researchers came together to discuss radical political economy and structural transformation in Africa. Over two days wide-ranging discussions and debates explored a variety of radical perspectives, on activism, resistance and research across the continent.

The workshop was the first of three in Africa. The second is in Dar es Salaam in April and the final meeting will be in Johannesburg 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 Ghana were the lessons that can be drawn from revolutionary historical transitions, including the Russian revolution, and the demise of colonialism in Africa. What has been the impact of limited industrialisation and the scramble for African resources on both urban and rural patterns of class formation and the potential for organising resistance? 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?

Discussing financialisation, accummulation and livelihoods: Sam Ashman, Gyekye Tanoh, Akua Britwum and Peter Lawrence

We discussed how ROAPE was set up in 1974 in the era of late independence movements. ROAPE was founded to promote support and solidarity as well as radical intellectual clout, to the militant movements and governments that emerged after the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974. In Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau the Review sought to support what were regarded as socialist projects in countries that had already become independent.

The workshop examined the nature of the ‘world economy’ and what it might mean for projects of structural transformation. How are alternative projects for equitable and just development curtailed by this world economy? Is the concept of ‘auto-centric’ development, similar to Samir Amin’s sovereign national project, possible or desirable?

Reference was made to the work, life and activism of African revolutionaries and politicians. Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba and Amílcar Cabral. Each of these activists, in distinct ways, spoke of the limits of sovereignty, and how national liberation became a ‘curse’ or a ‘prison’. Each of them, focused on the role of the petty-bourgeoise leadership of the liberation struggle, frequently paralysing radical movements within national liberation.

Participants also spoke in detail about the major contours of the continents’ contemporary political economy, charting financialisation, industrialisation policy, patterns of accumulation, against continuing primitive accumulation and dispossession. Speakers spoke about Chinese investment and involvement in artisanal mining in Ghana, land enclosures and agriculture in Uganda and Tanzania, and Tunisia’s post-revolution land crisis and reforms.

For all of these questions, we returned to the role of the Review and our activism. Can the Review broaden its work to bring solidarity and information about struggles today on the continent? What role does the journal have in keeping a revolutionary tradition alive? And what does that (heterodox) tradition look like in the contemporary period?

We spent a considerable amount of time in Accra looking at the possibilities of a new politics emerging from sites of contestation in Africa and looking both at the potential for revolutionary activity in Africa and for international solidarity in the 21st century, following the current crises in capitalism.

Progressive Transformation Agendas from Below: Munyaradzi Gwisai, Habib Ayeb, Bettina Engels and Ndongo Sylla

Over the coming weeks, roape.net will be posting blogs, short interviews and comments on the workshop. We hope these posts will do two things. Firstly, continue the discussions started in Accra, and secondly, draw in other voices.

Given the recent, tumultuous events in Zimbabwe, we begin by posting short interviews filmed in Accra by ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer with Tafadzwa Choto and ROAPE’s Laura Mann interviewing Munyaradzi Gwisai. Both interviews provide invaluable insight into the dynamics of protest, the political crisis and the attempts of ruling ZANU-PF clique to hold on to power even without Robert Mugabe.

Tafadzwa Choto talks about the economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe, the impact on ordinary people, and some of the factors that are likely to worsen or mitigate the situation in forthcoming years. Choto is a well-known labour activist, researcher and currently director of the Zimbabwe Labour Centre.

Munyaradzi Gwisai discusses the political turmoil in Zimbabwe, and the possibilities of a radical alternative emerging in the coming years. Gwisai is a former Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) parliamentarian, is a law lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe and coordinator of the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe.

Protest, Racism and Gender in South Africa

ROAPE

November 9, 2017

ROAPE speaks to Nombuso Mathibela about student protests, institutional racism and gender in South Africa. Mathibela was involved in the student movement in South Africa in 2015-16 and is Fellow at the Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education working on expanding political education to assist social movements in their struggles.

Can you tell roape.net a little about yourself, where you grew up, your involvement in the student struggles in South Africa in recent years?

I grew up in Durban, a coastal city in eastern South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, I lived there for about 13 years and then moved to Johannesburg a landlocked city in the province of Gauteng. When the time came for me to go to university, the first choice was to get out of Johannesburg and I than decided to move to Cape Town in the Western Cape.

Having lived in three historically and culturally different cities that equally have a distinct history of struggle – I began to understand the manifestations of colonial and apartheid rule to play out quite differently. So, in Durban the tensions between the Indian communities (most came to South Africa as indentured labour and some as merchants) and Zulu communities were quite rife at a historical and interpersonal level – old wounds of internal division as a result of colonial wars and apartheid, built up a lot of stereotypes and prejudices within these communities. But at the same time, I saw a lot of solidarity, cultural co-creation amongst these groups of people specifically within the working-class communities. This solidarity took form through trading in the food markets as one example– in fact you could find many working class Indian people speaking isiZulu or dialects – in many ways also defying the spatial separation between Zulu people in the ‘townships’ ‘informal living spaces’ and Indian people who were located in ‘Indian townships’ areas such Phoenix and Chatsworth. I grew up eating mostly Indian foods and Zulu traditional meals and most of the people I grew up with came from these communities – the tensions were there but some sort of understanding too.

Living in Durban shaped my understanding of race, the dynamics that exist within middle and working-class communities, and I also got to witness the legacy of apartheid, specifically how it highlighted, exaggerated tribal and ethnic difference to the demise of oppressed people. This, then contextualised my experience of Cape Town, a city that reeks of dispossession and hectic spatial inequality of racial and class lines. In some ways the relationship between ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ people reminded me of my experiences in Durban and helped me adjust to the political climate that I found in the city. My early years of university were quite politically different, the traditional structural formation of party-aligned student organisations dominated quite clearly i.e. SASCO, PASMA and DASO, which are student organisations that are aligned and affiliated to the ruling party the ANC and its opposition parties. Student protests in South Africa were already taking place way before the MustFall movement(s) in 2015, through party aligned organisation and other student formations were also rallying under Black consciousness and Black feminism. But my critical involvement at a collective organised level, came into being in 2015 when students formed the RhodeMustFall movement.

Can you discuss how you became involved in the protests in South Africa, what were the major issues and how did these develop?

My experiences in Cape Town were largely shaped by my outsider status as someone who came to study at one of the whitest universities on the continent. It took a while to actually understand Cape Town outside of the university and part of this I am indebted to the student movement, the people I met in this space and the political formations that were made on the basis of collective recognition that there is something wrong with the University of Cape Town (UCT), with the city and quite frankly South Africa as a whole.

This collective recognition, from my understanding was the key catalyst in the formation of what then became the MustFall Movement(s). People were no longer suffering in silos or agitating against power at an interpersonal level but there was a recognition that the crisis in legal education for instance is a broader crisis of pedagogy and an institutional culture that exists across South Africa,. It doesn’t only concern the realities of knowledge production of the historically dispossessed and oppressed.

So, I suppose I was one of those students who felt they did not belong in the university and the struggles of other black students were quite personal. My involvement in the student movement sort of came from that place – a place of needing to deal with historical injustice, current manifestations of anti-blackness – be it the curriculum, the financial exclusion of black students, the exploitation of outsourced workers and the patriarchal nature of the university.

Like many black student activists at UCT during the time of #RhodesMustFall (RMF), I was involved in supporting the struggles of the movement right through to the formation of the #feesmustfall and #endoutsourcing movements. Most of my involvement subsequently moved towards a law faculty based movement that students had formed called DecoloniseUCTLaw, which came out of the need to branch out; RMF couldn’t deal with all the demands and some could be achieved at a faculty level. Hence, we saw the formation of other faculty-based movements although not all explicitly RMF aligned.

The initial outburst of the ‘fallist’ movement was unfortunately understood as primarily an obsession to remove the statue of a European settler and coloniser Cecil John Rhodes, situated at UCT overlooking the city. But as many people have clarified, the demands were much broader, and the statue was simply a symbolic catalyst for us to talk about historical justice, the eurocentricity of curriculum, the racist and alienating institutional culture, the mentally destructive space of UCT, the financial exclusion of black students and exploitation of workers with undignified wages.

With the uprising of students around South African universities the demands began to take a national front were the main demands basically centered around free education and the end to outsourcing. These were two issues that all campus could rally behind and in fact many people saw the reformation of the student-worker coalition as an important step towards contesting the current democratic dispensation – moving the issues outside of our individual campuses and putting forward these two issues as a national crisis.

To start with in 2015, the protest wave at South African universities raised questions of student fee increments, but rapidly seemed to develop into a more generalised movement that targeted the nature of the 1994 settlement. Reflecting on your direct involvement in these struggles how would you chart the rapid growth of the movement in 2015 and afterwards?

The movement(s) move towards critiquing the 1994 settlement began long before the RhodesMustFall movement or the subsequent FeesMustFall movement(s), many of the student groups and political blocs that came to form these movements were already calling the 1994 settlement into question. In fact, these groups infused this critique into the 2015 movements and the response was quite organic because their articulations aligned with the sentiments that students held with regards to the current state of South Africa. The radical call for free education from some groups instead of ‘no fee increment’ was in fact a response to the 1994 settlement – because some of us saw this demand as a way of restructuring the nature education and its institutions as a whole. That said, I think the rapid growth was largely due to the formation of the student worker coalition. The involvement of workers totally changed the dynamics of protest intervention and strikes, before then students were protesting alone; because of the precarious nature of workers’ jobs most of the time the strategy revolved around students having to shut down campus and dining halls on their own – through that intervention workers would then be ‘released’. We all know that these universities cannot function without workers so the FeesMustFall movement became much stronger through this coalition.

Students and workers realized that their temporary power was in their combined numbers and their ability to stop the functioning of the university – so there were many attempts to build this coalition though it was harder in some campuses because of stifling trade union involvement, the levels of securitization from the side of the university and the state became unbearable. Unfortunately, at a collective national level there was no consolidated national programme. Therefore, in most cases insourcing of workers was partially won in some campuses, and in some of those campuses this victory came with a lot of punishment – through the retrenchment of many workers to ‘compensate’ for the so-called ‘end to outsourcing.’ At the moment we still have workers who have been dismissed at the University of Stellenbosh, University of Western Cape, Cape Peninsula University of Technology and other universities across the country are having difficulties with insourcing.

As the movement grew, and drew in wider layers of students, lecturers and workers, other issues were raised. These included questions of continued ‘colonial’ control of the university curriculum, the continued public symbols of the previous racist state and the failure of real and lasting transformation for the majority of black South Africans. What today are the major issues confronting the movement and students?

When RhodesMustFall formed, the movement took on a flat structure and it was known as a ‘leaderless’ movement, which is complicated in itself because ultimately there were people who formed some sort of leadership structure invisible or not. So, when the FeesMustFall movements formed they sort of took on this structure but in some campuses there was a more defined leadership structure – some political party affiliated and in many ways this became one of the major issues confronting the movement. There’s no consolidated national student movement but simply pockets of students organising under FeesMustFall. The movement has no membership, students move in and out of it, there is no organisational structure and because of the political and personal differences it has become increasingly difficult to hold national or even regional meetings to chart a way forward or a programme of how students are going to build a mass movement for free education, get the buy-in of parents, civil organisations, workers etc. The power dynamics internally have become one of the stifling blocs for the student movement. This is merely one aspect that has really troubled quite a few of us because it has made it quite difficult to assist students – so a lot of people are sort of picking areas were they think they can assist in corners but there is not a consolidated voice that I am aware of even though there are many people working in the background in many campuses.

How have issues of sexism within wider society and inside the movement played out during this period of activism?

Patriarchy and deep manifestations of sexism broke down FeesMustFall’s momentum, in as much as movements like RhodesMustFall initially took up intersectionality as an organising theory, the persistence of specific hyper masculinities made it quite difficult for bodies existing outside of those masculinities to find expression. Many black womxn found it really difficult to organise within these movements but perhaps the groups that found it most difficult were the queer community and non-binary bodies. Many people felt that the space was extremely patriarchal and that it centered the voices and expressions of male figures. The division of labour within the movement was quite contested, who does what – when it came to speaking out in plenary session (meeting), who are the dominant voices, when students are in the middle of action who are the people on the ground leading the programme of action, who writes statements and sits in meetings with management, and who can publicly speak about the movement – all of this was contested. And remains contested. That said, the worst aspects that made it very difficult to organise is the insidious culture of sexual violence within the student movement, this was a problem throughout the country; students at a university currently known as Rhodes (UCKAR), black women and non-binary people came out in full force launching a protest campaign called the #Rureferencelist, which literally revealed the rot of our university space and movements. All of this is happening in country that has one of the most debilitating statistics of gender-based violence, so what is happening in our movements and the university is merely a reflection of very real national crisis.

Thinking back on the #RhodesMustFall era, a slogan that went around ‘Dear history/ this revolution has women, gays, queers & trans people – remember that’ – I think students were invoking the theory of intersectionality, that as black bodies we also exist in different spaces and hold other identities that are the cause of experiencing violence. There were attempts at the time to center these voices and for quite some time there was a power shift and quite a solid base of black queer women and trans people exercising power within the movement – however short lived. What intersectionality did was allow ‘functional discomfort’ within the movement and make room for people to contest the direction of the movement – its strategies and tactics and the nature of demands that were being put forward above others. I don’t think #RhodesMustFall or subsequently FeesMustFall succeeded in dealing with patriarchy and its manifestations nor is this surprising because these movements are a manifestation and a reflection of society as it is, but some hard lessons came out of this experience for many people about organising.

What, would you say – and in your experience – are the main challenges for the development of a progressive, non-sexist politics in South Africa?

I think the answer is both simple and complicated but for me – a politics that seeks to destroy gender as an oppressive organising principle is the aspiration under different circumstances. It’s quite true that many men are among the stifling factor in the quest to build a non-sexist politics because the current politics is premised on the domination of specific gendered bodies at the level of politics. The levels at which black women and non-binary people experience violence has necesitated a politics that centers gender and queer theory and practice simply because the culture of marginalisation is so rife. South Africa’s history of struggle is loaded with similar issues of patriarchy, sexism and sexual violence – the collective sidelining of black women and non-binary people is not a new phenomenon nor is it particular to South African history.

That is part of the challenge, that patriarchy and manifestations of sexist behavior have been able to mutate at different levels of struggle – the scary part is that many people want to particularise these challenges to current movements and not look outside – that in itself is a challenge. This is a big question and I think people need to come together and think about these challenges , because of the nature of capitalism and colonialism it is that working class and black people in particular are impacted by different forms of oppression in a more accute way. These groups must be at the forefront of determining what way we move forward – in a sense that is a prerequisite and its something that cannot be solved by one person, it will have to be solved by a movement.

Nombuso Mathibela is a Fellow at Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education, and was involved in the student movement in South Africa, her current work is around expanding political education for the purposes of assisting social movements in their struggles.

All photographs in the interview have been provided by Nombuso Mathibela.

Neoliberalism, Political Economy and Africa

ROAPE

November 2, 2017

ROAPE talks to Matteo Rizzo about his new book Taken for a Ride, based on his research in Dar es Salaam. The book is a detailed study of public transport in Dar es Salaam and provides a profound examination of the transformation of society, state and politics in Tanzania since the 1970. As Dar es Salaam grew, Matteo writes, so did the demand for public transport and public transport provision experienced chronic difficulties. Taken for a Ride is a major contribution demonstrating the continued analytical relevance of radical political economy, challenging the claim that class analysis is necessarily dogmatic and reductionist.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us about how you came to do research in Tanzania in the 1990s?

I am from Palermo, Sicily, Italy. I am a political economist. I trained in political sciences at “L’Orientale”, in Naples, and development studies and economic and social history at SOAS, University of London, where I currently work as a senior lecturer in the department of development studies. My interest in Tanzania stems from having studied Swahili for four years as part of my first degree in political sciences with focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Orienting my research towards Tanzania then became a kind of induced choice, as the interest in the country and fluency in Swahili allowed me to undertake research in a way that I was unable to do in other countries.

Could you explain the genesis of your new book, Taken for a Ride? What was your own journey to this research and how did the idea of it evolve?

The research project has a relatively long gestation. It began back in 1996 when, immediately upon arriving in Dar es Salaam, on my first visit to Tanzania as a Political Sciences of Africa student, I developed an interest in the city’s public transport system, and in particular its daladala, as the minibuses which provide public transport are known in Swahili. Seemingly ubiquitous, colourful and painted with aphorisms, these buses caught my attention, as the sound of the workers calling the stops to attract passengers on board is the soundscape to the city. This early interest was soon accompanied by the reflection that these private buses dominated the transport system of what was once one of the most famous socialist experiments in Africa. I therefore decided to focus my undergraduate dissertation (and subsequently my MSc dissertation at SOAS) on the city’s public transport system, its history and political economy.

My doctoral work, still at SOAS, but on a different topic and discipline (on late colonial and postcolonial development history) took me to Dar es Salaam again, as I carried out archival work in 2001-2002 in the city. Days in the archive would often terminate with visits to a group of daladala workers on whom my research had focussed in 1998. Studying labour relations in bus public transport, as key to understand how public transport works in Dar es Salaam, and for whom, was my main research interest at this stage. When I re-joined academia in 2008, following a 3-year career break, I continued to research public transport in Dar es Salaam through short research trips in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014.

In the most recent fieldwork spells, my research aimed to make sense of two important changes in public transport which had emerged since 2002. First, its bus workers had organised and in partnership with the Tanzanian Transport Union had begun, slowly but surely, to struggle for labour rights. Understanding how workers organised, their strategy and achievements to make demands on employers and the state, became one of my research objectives. Second, the World Bank-sponsored Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) began its very slow implementation. I studied the reasons for this delay, which had to do with the various ways in which a range of Tanzanian actors that stood to be displaced by BRT orchestrated their resistance. All in all, what held together my evolving research focus on public transport in Dar es Salaam over the years was its interest in understanding its different and changing facets of power and .

Can you describe how the political-economy of Dar es Salaam public transport has evolved since independence? Is neoliberalism a useful prism through which to view its liberalisation?

The trajectory of public transport in Dar es Salaam mirrors that of most African cities. It was provided by the state under monopoly regime since 1970. As Dar es Salaam grew and so did the demand for public transport, public transport provision experienced chronic difficulties. The state, which was hit hard by the oil crisis of 1974, was unable to increase its supply of public transport. In 1983, reflecting broader changes in the direction of policy-making in Tanzania and in Africa, the provision of public transport was opened-up to private operators. The state retained substantial control over pubic transport until the early 1990s. Since then the state relinquished its control over entrance into the service and over fare levels.

I would argue that neoliberalism is indeed a useful concept to understand, from the early 1980s to the present, Tanzania’s wider political economy, including its changing policies in the public transport system. Neoliberalism is to be understood as a political project, associated with a set of economic policies, and promoted through agents. Whilst wide-ranging in focus, neoliberal policies are rooted in the idea that the promotion of an individual’s economic freedom and private capital is the best way to organise economies and societies. To be sure, neoliberalism is a slippery concept and as such it needs handling with care. But those scholars who argue that we are better off abandoning its use if we are to understand urban realities in Africa (for one important example see Robinson and Parnell, 2011) miss the point, as there is much to be lost in rejecting the concept when making sense of how the public transport system in Dar es Salaam functions, or does not function, and the way in which it has changed over the years. One can empirically see how the promotion of neoliberalism, in complex and different ways over time, has proved to be the main force behind these changes. In the early 1980s, the state was ‘rolled-back’ from the provision of public transport. In the early 2000s, an injection of over 150 million dollars laid the ground for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), a public-private partnership in public transport. Under the plans, the public sector funds the BRT with tax payers’ money, while the private sector operates the system.

While Dar es Salaam’s experience of a shift in the provision of public transport from public to private mirrors that of every main African city, the actual shape neoliberalism took in Dar es Salaam’s public transport and its politics was unique. The researcher’s job is to ground neoliberalism in particular contexts, and this requires attention to the domestic politics and path dependency of its promotion, and to the challenges and resistance that this triggered. This entails, first and foremost, identifying the range of different actors who had stakes in the sector, and on what sorts of power, if any, they drew in their attempts to influence developments in it.

You mention Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, in which he describes the demise of the post-colonial state development project from the 1970s.

Perhaps let me start with the strength and importance of Davis’ book, which lies in what was arguably its intended goal, the systematic debunking of mainstream fantasies of slum improvements and of the potential for poverty eradication and economic mobility within the informal economy. His focus on how structural forces influence the nature of the urban poor’s experience of the city in developing countries is important, if chilling. Behind the apocalyptic tone of his Planet of Slums, that so many readers find excessive and disturbing, lies the fact that urbanization in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—unlike urbanization in the nineteenth century in the now-developed world—has often not been accompanied and driven by economic growth and industrialization. Davis crucially reminds us that, because of this, many poor countries host ‘cities without jobs’, as the number of job seekers in them has grown rapidly, while the capacity of the formal economy to absorb labour has decreased, rather than expanded.

As a consequence of this imbalance, the majority of people are pushed towards work in the informal economy, the last-resort employer of this ‘surplus humanity’. These are insights that go a long way in explaining how public transport works and for whom, in Dar es Salaam. As Taken for a Ride discusses at length, the speeding, overloading of vehicles and the general disregard of road safety by transport workers are to be understood as the reaction of workers to their “squeeze” by bus owners. They expect a very high sum of money from workers at the end of each day, a sum that workers can accumulate only by working very long days (16 hours on average). And to understand why workers have limited bargaining power when confronting employers, we need to understand that the lack of structural transformation and industrialization in Tanzania resulted in a highly dysfunctional labour market, with a pronounced shortage of jobs for unskilled workers. Once more, as Davis so effectively put it, ‘cities without jobs’.

Critics identify two main weaknesses in Davis’ work. One is what they see as its excessive focus on structures and its lack of attention to the historical agency that the poor might exert in cities either to change the grim conditions in which they live and work, or even to survive them. There are indeed examples of left-leaning writing which is overly deterministic in its attention to structures. However, what I find problematic about this reading of Davis’s work on slums as hopelessly pessimistic, is that Davis planned to write, with Forrest Hylton, a sequel book on ‘the history and future of slum-based resistance to global capitalism’ (Davis 2006: 201, 207), on the basis of ‘concrete, comparative case studies’, exploring ‘the bewildering variety of responses to structural neglect and deprivation’ and ‘the myriad acts of resistance’. This sequel book was never written, but the very fact that it was planned raises questions about dismissing Davis’s work as conceptually blind to issues of agency by the poor.

A more valid criticism is its tendency to over-aggregation, whereas a more descriptive ‘exploding’ of the slums was, perhaps, necessary. For example, lumping the entire population of Soweto, home as it is to about two million residents in Johannesburg, under the category of slum resident, conceals its remarkable heterogeneity, which includes relatively wealthy areas.

You challenge some of the literature on the African city as ‘unhinged from the material and the economic’. Can you also talk about this challenge you make to the ‘romantic and unsubstantiated celebration’ of the poor?

This book is entitled Taken for a Ride because its analysis aims to debunk two misleading narratives that have become dominant in writing on African cities and on their informal economies. The first, which can be dubbed as ‘postcolonial’ is associated with the influential work of, among many others, Pieterse, Robinson, and Simone. Its celebration of the functionality of African cities, and of the agency of the African urban poor, including their initiatives in the informal economy, pays inadequate attention to the magnitude and nature of the structural forces at play in African cities and in the informal economy. It also fails to articulate whether and how the alternative order and social fabric woven by urban poor initiatives, to which their works refer, help to address the structural problems of African cities or the structural disadvantage faced by the poor.

A second narrative is that informed by mainstream economics, of which De Soto’s market fundamentalism is the best example. Its celebratory reading of informal economic activities as poor people’s empowerment is equally unconvincing, as it presents a rosy conceptualization of the nature of markets and how they work. A close examination of the reality of working in the informal economy in public transport in Dar es Salaam, and of the operations of private operators in unregulated markets, will suggest that the superior efficiency of the private individual in ‘free markets’, which has informed policymaking since the early 1980s, is no more than an ideological article of faith. It will also show that readers on urban Africa and their informal economies are not the only category who have been taken for a ride; passengers’ experience of Dar es Salaam public transport following economic deregulation was very different from what the advocates of reforms had promised, as speeding and overloading became the trademark characteristics of the inefficient private operators which supplied public transport to the city.

What the postcolonial and mainstream economics approaches share is a lack of attention to the political and economic structures in which we need to locate the study of the agency of the poor and the barriers that stand against their efforts to improve their circumstances.

Your book is a sustained challenge to a sloppy understanding of Tanzania and the continent in much of the scholarly analysis – shorn of a rigourous critical political economy and class analysis. How would you assess the dominance of these approaches in African studies in general and in your research and writing on informalisation and the city in particular?

Obviously Roape is atypical, and inspiringly so, in its tradition of class analysis and critical political economy. But outside Roape, class analysis and critical political economy have become unfashionable since the late 1980s. A glance at the programmes of the large African studies conferences, like ECAS, ASAUS or ASAUK, and of the keynote speakers and the themes around which panels are populated, signals the strong influence of postcolonial approaches in African studies today. Mainstream economics still holds a lot of influence in development studies and economics. But there is increasingly more and more attention to labour and class, and I hope that Taken for a Ride can be a small contribution to show the analytical and political relevance of radical political economy and to challenge the claim that class analysis is necessarily dogmatic and reductionist.

It is not just at the level of ideas, you mention that some of these ideas influenced policy makers, i.e. de Soto’s work praising neoliberalism. Can you talk briefly about this?

De Soto sees growth of the informal economy as the consequence of a choice by entrepreneurs, rooted in their spontaneous and collective response to over-regulation by predatory state apparatuses. De Soto puts forward a simple idea, and a very seductive one for policymakers, that the informal sector exists in separation from the formal sector, and it is the refuge of the urban poor who are excluded from the formal economy. De Soto pays no attention to internal differentiation within the informal economy and to whether such differentiation impacts on how informality works for different kinds of people. This is part of his explicit downplaying of the explanatory power of class. Its usefulness, he suggests, has been made redundant by the (alleged) reality that self-employment and working for a family business are the dominant employment relations in the informal economy. As de Soto put it, ‘Marx would probably be shocked to find out how in developing countries much of the teeming mass does not consist of oppressed legal proletarians but of oppressed extralegal small entrepreneurs’ (de Soto 2001: 229).

The influence of these ideas on policymakers can be seen in the many programmes promoting the formalization of property rights and small businesses, which have been rolled out across developing countries, Africa included. Their record in unlocking the productive potential of the poor has been far from positive. While microcredit has different roots, it is an intervention that dovetails effectively with the narrative of the informal poor as small-scale entrepreneurs, and on that premise it has attempted to foster their financial inclusion, with very mixed results. Above all, this approach, and the interventions that emanate from it, suffers from ‘jobs dementia’, as Amsden (2010: 60) memorably termed it: the belief that by supplying credit or training to self-employed entrepreneurs, demand for such businesses will, somehow, materialize. Urban poverty-reduction efforts must rest on a grounded study of urban capitalism and the place of the poor in it, rather than on idealised and misleading notions of entrepreneurship.

In place of the twin faults of the literature – vague ‘romanticism’ on informalisation and ‘market fundamentalism’ – you pose a non-teleogical and non-deterministic Marxism. Can you explain how you see this approach as superior, and how its helped to clarify your research in the book?

As I said, the urban poor must be located within an economic, social and political context. Making sense of the formidable structural forces the informal poor are up against is crucial to understanding their agency in the process of development, in a less romantic and more grounded fashion. In this case-study of urban public transport in Dar es Salaam and its development over time, first and foremost, I use class as a relational concept. Ownership of capital (such as land and other assets, most notably buses in this case), as opposed to the sale of labour power to those with such capital, determines people’s class position in the structure of a given society, and their economic stakes. The social relations between capital and labour, and the dynamics of class formation over time, are the key drivers (but not the only ones) of processes of socio-economic change. Their study must begin with questions such as ‘who owns what’ and ‘who does what with it’ as these are key to understanding the nature and actors of capitalist development. Only by posing such questions can one see that the private operators of bus public transport in Dar es Salaam are differentiated between those who own the vehicles and those who work on them. Posing these questions also reveals that the employment relationship linking these two classes is central to the way in which the service of public transport is provided, with all its tensions. The consequences of unregulated employment relations affect not only workers but also Dar es Salaam’s public; speeding, overloading buses, and refusing transport to school pupils are to be understood as practices through which workers respond to exploitation by bus owners.

Second, while class matters, its manifestation is messy and in many ways elusive, as one can observe different categories of transport workers, with different roles and interests, in the labour process. The book draws on Bernstein’s conceptualization of this phenomenon in terms of ‘classes of labour’ to make sense of this. The common ground of these workers, is that the sale of labour power is their main source of income.

Third, the identity, political consciousness, and capacity to act collectively by ‘classes of labour’ cannot be ‘read off’ from their socio-economic position in society in a teleological or functionalist fashion. This means that the study of labour identity(ies) and the extent to which it is experienced and expressed—or not—in class terms is an important line of enquiry in itself and one that requires attention to the way in which workers’ activists and transport unionists constructed a shared meaning of exploitation to then act upon it. None of this approach is teleological or deterministic, as critics of Marxian political economy too hastily suggest.

A meeting of a dalaladala workers’ association in Dar es Salaam (Matteo Rizzo, 1998)

I wonder whether you can say something about the nature / character of Tanzania’s ‘socialist’ past and the ways this has influenced/impacted on the liberalisation of Tanzanian society? How also has it impacted the development of resistance to these reforms?

Post-socialism is indeed an insightful analytical lens to understand neoliberalism, its politics in Tanzania, and the ambivalent positions of the Tanzanian government towards economic reform, including the direction of public transport in Dar es Salaam. The Tanzanian government has been seen as a model implementer of economic liberalization in many ways, but far from straightforward in its commitment to it, as values and discourses from the socialist period both called for and informed its attempts to intervene in the economy. Research on Eastern and Central European countries, and on China, has thrown important light on the hybrid and contradictory thrust of policy-making in countries embracing economic liberalization following the demise of socialism. Among Africanists, Pitcher and Askew incisively argue for more historical depth in much research on neoliberalism on the continent and in particular for an understanding of ‘whether, or how, a socialist past might shape a postsocialist present’ (Pitcher and Askew 2006: 3).

In paying attention to Tanzania’s socialist past and what is left of it, one must begin by noting that its ruling party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) first and then Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has been in power since independence. Since then, TANU/CCM transitioned from being the spearhead of ujamaa, as Tanzanian socialism was named from 1967 to the mid-1980s, to being the implementer of one of the most comprehensive experiences of economic liberalization in sub-Saharan Africa, and one for which Tanzania became one of the donors’ darlings. Throughout the process, the uses of the socialist past have been open-ended, as different actors have exploited in different ways concepts that were central to the building of a socialist nation under ujamaa, such as egalitarianism, social justice, and state ownership. These have been reappropriated and/or reworked, both to resist economic and political liberalization and to justify it. As Taken for a Ride shows, in the case of public transport, socialist ideals have been mobilized to bring back notions of social justice and public ownership in the liberalized economy and to justify attempts, with limited capacity and success, to bring back some degree of regulation in the liberalized sector.

You write in detail in the book about the development of the transport workers organisations and how workers organise themselves in the sector. What factors mitigated against an effective collective response to their situation?

As one transport worker wrote on the back of his bus, “Kazi mbaya; ukiwa nayo” [Bad job, if you have one]. The relatively unskilled nature of work in public transport, and the oversupply of unskilled workers in Tanzania today, is the first aspect to bear in mind when understanding the barriers to workers’ organization. The mismatch between demand for work in the sector and existing employment opportunities significantly undermined the bargaining power of daladala workers when facing employers, as the oversupply of workers forces workers to accept very long working days, and uncertain and meagre returns. Then there is the related issue of the fragmentation amongst different ‘classes of labour’ performing different tasks, and with different interests, as overworked workers call on underemployed workers, to whom they sub-contract part of the working day. Finally, the spatial unit in which transport work is performed matters as the atomised nature of work in buses, as opposed to a factory, was a barrier to the emergence of workers’ effective collective response to their plight.

These were significant constraints to the organization of workers. But none of the barriers above should be crudely seen as destiny, the course of which cannot be changed. As I learned from later rounds of fieldworks, a group of workers successfully established a workers’ organization in the late 1990s, and over time, in partnership with the Tanzanian transport trade unions, achieved limited but substantive gains through their demands on employers and the state. How workers’ organised and what were their goals, therefore became part of my study.

‘Kazi mbaya; ukiwa nayo’ (Bad job, if you have one) on the back of a taxi in Dar es Salaam (Matteo Rizzo, 2002).

What conclusions would you draw from your research on labour possibilities and what the ‘unorganised’ can achieve in an informal economy in the Global South?

I think we can draw out three related conclusions. The first one is about time-frames in research. Struggling for labour rights in this segment of the informal economy entailed a slow effort at constructing a common ground between informal workers and their Union counterpart. The complex nature of this process partly explains the very slow pace at which change took place. So, we need to allow adequate time-frames when studying the political organization of informal workers.

The second conclusion is methodological, as the book shows the value of class-based political economy as an analytical approach. Far too often, studies on economic informality skirt around the questions of who owns what, and with what outcomes, in the informal economy. By contrast, this study demonstrates that understanding the way in which the workers are linked to (capitalist) employers, locating workers within their economic contexts, and mapping the sources of both their precariousness and power, is essential in making sense of whether, why and how workers mobilize politically. Asking these questions in no way condemns the analysis to functionalism and reductionism, which are certainly features of some work in the radical political economy tradition, but which can be avoided. Taken for a Ride does not simply read off workers’ political interests from their economic position in society, nor has it identified the economic position of workers as the only predictor of what was politically possible for them. Indeed, the very barriers that prevented the organization of these workers up to 1995 were then overcome through the initiative of some workers and the events that unfolded subsequently.

The third and final lesson to be learned from this study is that its findings challenge widely-held beliefs: that collective action by organized (or organizing) labour belongs to the past; that the problem poor people face is not one of adverse incorporation and exploitation by capitalism through informal and highly precarious work; and that social protection is a more realistic and strategic policy target in tackling workers’ precariousness. The workers who are the protagonists of Taken for a Ride share the lack of a clear employment relationship to their employers—the main characteristic that, it is argued, prevents workers’ mobilization for a ‘rights at work’ agenda in the informal economy. While this was indeed the main source of workers’ precariousness at work, it was also the very stimulus and goal of their mobilization. When challenging, with some success, the unclear nature of employment relations in the sector, workers drew on the significant structural power they commanded as providers of the cheapest form of available public transport. While the circumstances and context in which these workers’ mobilization took place are necessarily specific, the broader lesson is that we need to disaggregate the realms of the possible for different groups of workers in different economic sectors and countries. Above all, rather than celebrating prematurely the death of organising and organised labour, my work is a call to put ongoing labour struggles at the centre of our reflection on the possibilities for action by precarious workers.

Matteo Rizzo is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. Matteo has degrees in Political Sciences from “L’Orientale” (Naples, Italy) and Development Studies and History from SOAS (MSc and PhD), where he also completed an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship. Matteo has taught at the LSE, at the African Studies Centre in Oxford and in Cambridge, where he was a Smuts Research Fellow in African Studies at the Centre of African Studies. Matteo is a member of the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy and works on public transport for the International Transport Workers Federation.

Taken for a ride: Grounding neoliberalism, precarious labour and public transport in an African metropolis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Series on Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research, and Policy in International Development Studies (for readers of roape.net on the publishers page please enter the code ASFLYQ6 for a 30% discount on the cover price).

References

Amsden, A.H. 2010. ‘Say’s Law, Poverty Persistence, and Employment Neglect’. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 11 (1): pp. 57–66.

Bernstein, H. 2007. ‘Capital and Labour from Centre to Margins’. Prepared for the Living on the Margins Conference, 26–28 March, Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Davis, M. 2006. Planet of Slums. London and New York: Verso.

Pieterse, E. 2008. City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development. London and New York: Zed Books.

Pitcher, A. M. and Askew, K. M. 2006. ‘African Socialism and Postsocialism’, Special Issue of Africa 76 (1): 1–14.

Robinson, J. 2006. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. Questioning Cities Series. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Robinson, J. and Parnell, S. 2011. ‘Travelling Theory: Embracing Post-Neoliberalism through Southern Cities’, in G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds), The New Blackwell Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell, 521–31.

Simone, A. 2004b. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Lives in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

de Soto, H. 1989. The Other Path. New York: Harper and Row.

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