Realities on the Ground: David Harvey replies to John Smith

February 5, 2018

By David Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Delinking the Global South: Structural Transformation in Africa

ROAPE

January 31, 2018

By Arndt Hopfmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questioning Power?

ROAPE

January 24, 2018

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

By Heike Becker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rosa Luxemburg conference left me with many questions.

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

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

Environmental Crisis, Africa and National Development

ROAPE

January 18, 2018

By Salvador Ousmane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salvador Ousmane is a Senior Lecturer and writer.

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

David Harvey Denies Imperialism

ROAPE

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.

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Photo Gallery: Accra, 13-14 November 2017

Debate Special Issue: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt

Capitalism: A Moving Target for Radical Political Economy

Decarbonization reproduces colonial inequalities

Oligarchy and the subversion of democracy – warnings from South Africa

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