The Meanings of Solidarity

December 4, 2015

By Graham Harrison

I had two brief conversations in the mid 1990s that stick uncomfortably in my mind. One took place at a ‘frontline states’ solidarity meeting, gathering together a mixture of anti-apartheid campaigners and those within the British ‘new left’. The main topic was the war in Angola which was presented as a South African war of aggression against the perceived legitimate Angolan government of the MPLA. A woman asked the panellists about the evidence that the Angolan army had been laying mines in civilian areas, leading to the predictable deaths and injuries of non-combatants. The panellist (who was a leading figure in the Angolan solidarity movement) replied (if memory serves me well) ‘Well, there’s a war on…’

The second meeting was with a Frelimo member in the London offices of the Mozambique Information Agency, a government-run advocacy/propaganda agency that was also very much involved in the Mozambican solidarity actions that roughly mirrored those relating to Angola: South Africa’s war of aggression against radical governments under siege. When I mentioned how Mozambican police had been accused of beating people assembled in opposition party rallies in the recently multi-party Mozambique, I was given the reply (again by memory and probably a paraphrase) ‘you have to bash a few heads together to keep order.’

These vignettes illustrate something that was pervasive – indeed constitutive – of solidarity movements in the UK (and likely elsewhere in the West) in relation to liberation movements in Africa. Solidarity politics in this framing had to negotiate active support for political movements that were themselves prosecuting violence that went beyond what might be portrayed as ‘self-defence’. This directly created a tension between political norms of solidarity and others regarding human rights.

The responses above suggest that one way to negotiate this tension is to downplay violence through references to ‘context’. In light of the sorry denouement of both Angolans and Mozambican liberation politics, this kind of rationalisation does not seem very attractive in hindsight. Especially in regards to Angola, it would seem that the violence of the Angolan state was in fact a core component of its modus operandi, arguably from its coming to power. The relativisation and contextualisation of state violence in the name of solidarity (some violence is worse than others and some violence is partially justified by circumstance) can look very shabby when the object of solidarity gives up the revolutionary ghost.

There are other options. One is to distinguish between liberatory violence and oppressive violence. This might derive from an adaptation of the ‘just war’ tradition which distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate targets, discusses where violence is unavoidable, and considers proportionality. Another approach would be to draw on one reading of Fanon to identify some violence as ‘cleansing’ or a means to shape a new revolutionary identity. It is within these two points of reference that one can see ‘freedom fighter’ imagery in southern Africa that fits with the images of Mao and Che. These negotiations of solidarity and violence are suited to the support of insurgencies rather than incumbent regimes.

A third way to manage the tensions of supporting violence in the name of liberation is to take a utilitarian and consequentialist approach. This means justifying violence in reference to its consequences. Effective violence deployed in the name of the cause. The liberation wars in southern Africa were replete with examples of this: the ‘war of the flea’ might involve the blowing up of infrastructure or the harrying of more remotely-located settler farms. If these actions are perceived to undermine racialised forms of rule, they are worthy of positive judgements.

The utilitarian approach seems more convincing when deployed in support of an insurgency against a more powerful state which is imperialist and racist. Insurgent military actions seem more heroic than state convoys of armoured personnel carriers and the aerial bombardments. But in a situation of incumbency, they look less convincing. The explanatory narratives start to relativise, couch, become more vexed. The violence is less a tenacious endeavour against a more-powerful state and more an exercise in power over others. Support for ‘radical regimes’ in Africa led some to make distinctions between dictatorship, developmental dictatorship and left-developmental dictatorship for example, each qualifier serving to soften anxieties about state coercion. Relatedly, one might also consider a more unsettling possibility which is that political violence by states (however yielded) does, to some extent, create its own justification and even legitimacy. For some, there is nothing like a victory to cover violence in glory.

Each of these negotiations of solidarity and violence reveal that sovereignty changes the moral and political map of support. This shift is part of the vexed ‘burden’ of statehood which erodes the sense that a movement is ‘fighting the good fight’ and introduces the high-order challenge of institutionalising power before one can consider legitimacy and justice, if only because of the simple fact that the latter two cannot realistically be imagined or achieved in the absence of the former. And, anyone on the Left will already be wearied by the succession of capitulations when liberation or socialist movements take state power. In situations where ‘radical’ states are actually states with some (perhaps a great deal of) radical properties, the question is: to what extent can one explain the apparently authoritarian practices of a remote state that one identifies with in terms of the adverse circumstances that it is faced with?

Answers to this question (there can never be a single answer; this is an intrinsically agonistic question) can be located on a spectrum of political norms generated within Western intellectual solidarity circles more broadly vis a vis African governance. One might start with Tanzania in the early 1970s when the rural villagisation programme led to the closing down of democratically-constituted co-operatives, the compulsory rounding up of peasants, and the installation of labour regimes structured by the state. At the time, discussion about Tanzania’s villagisation revolved around the possibilities for (social) ‘developmental’ outcomes rather than concerns with rights and freedoms. Tanzania was strongly supported by NGOs and Western governments (especially the Non Aligned Movement) and this support (and the intellectual discourses it produced) was based in a usually implicit political position which might be encapsulated as a contract. This contract was between the state (in this case Tanzania) and the NGO or left-leaning Western government in which authoritarian political action would be tolerated inasmuch as it could be connected to developmental outcomes. In Tanzania’s case, the outcomes were first and foremost social provision: communal villages were seen as the geographical fix for a resource-constrained state to provide primary health, education, and support for agriculture. In 1980s Mozambique, a generation of cooperantes supported and worked for a government that swept up thousands of ‘unproductive’ city dwellers and compulsorily relocated them in communal villages.

Beyond 1970s Tanzania and 1980s Mozambique, and moving away from a clear social-democratic position, one can see analogous versions of the same contract, a contract that generates a political solidarity with African states that can ‘produce the developmental goods’. I have heard a former New Labour minister (off the record) explicitly use this argument in regards to present-day Rwanda in a way that recalled to me the relativizing comments made by some anti-apartheid solidarity campaigners: after the genocide and in a region where Burundi and the DRC are neighbours, supporting the Rwandan government seems (awkwardly) reasonable. The difference between 1970s Tanzania and 2000s Rwanda is considerable, but they are both located on a gradient in which a balance is made between an implicit acceptance of state coercion in the name of (expected) developmental outcomes.

I am suggesting that solidarity politics in the West has to negotiate an aporia that derives from the fact that solidarity (especially when used as a political or campaigning norm) is based in notions of moral rightness, but actual practices of solidarity (advocacy through to financial support) require a range of ‘dirtied’ pragmatic kinds of politics in which coercion and violence are to some degree acceptable.

I am not wanting to resolve these issues because, as I have argued, solidarity politics is contentious politics, not amenable to some codification of violence-good and violence-bad. What I am arguing is that solidarity politics is often keen to efface the difficult issue of coercion and violence within the mobilisation of support for struggle and solidarity with certain governments. But the question of violence is an insistent question because it remains a hard fact that, in a world in which direct violence and ‘structural violence’ is exercised upon the poor, dispossessed and powerless with such relentless intensity, it would take the most déclassé and naïve liberalism to eschew the possibility of ‘progressive’ violence entirely. Most forms of oppression will not yield to the pressures of a ‘free press’ or a well-liked Facebook campaign. Unless one wishes to trivialise oppression one should expect resistance to be in part violent and as a result consider openly and with some empathy how a supportive movement relates to that.

* *

Things are hardly simplified by the fact that Western solidarity politics comes with its own heavy ideological baggage. In a broad historical view, Western solidarity mobilisations have relied upon combinations of cultural norms that derive from socialism, social democracy, liberalism, and Christianity. Jubilee 2000 exemplified a confluence of these norms, for example. And, although solidarity politics explicitly opposes itself to charitable campaigns, an honest view would recognise that there is a powerful ‘we’ and a remote and disempowered ‘they’ in even the most sibling-like solidarity. After all, Western publics can chose their fights; African publics live them.

More recently, Western public cultures have undergone something of a decaying of clear battle lines. Western governments have become astute at incorporating some campaigns into their own public relations machines, something that some campaign organisations have embraced with alacrity. The rise of celebrity politics has led to an increasingly weakened ‘solidarity agency’ in Western publics and injected a not insignificant dose of narcissism and consumer aesthetic into some forms of mobilisation in the name of justice. There are even vulgar ‘campaign’ signs deployed by transnational corporations through the slick branding of Fair Trade, environmental awareness, and corporate social responsibility (currently the world’s second greatest oxymoron after the war on terror).

Within this network of solidarities, by and large, gone are the thorny issues of violence and its (a)morality, and clear battle-lines have been superseded by networks, movements of movements, or ‘multitudes’. Perhaps the main underlying issue now is addressing the fact that African civil society organisations struggle from positions of extreme weakness: defensive, poorly-resourced, dependent on the resources and agendas of outsiders. This condition makes for moderate ambition. It produces a mismatch with the ‘another world is possible’ narrative that has emerged from the post-Porto Alegre world social fora. Indeed, it is noticeable that, beyond South Africa, Africans’ struggles and organisations have thus far not easily fitted into the grand narratives of global social justice.

It is something of a paradox that Africa, a world-region that exhibits so clearly some of the most anti-social and exploitative processes of accumulation, does not figure strongly in global social justice movements that have oriented around worker, peasant, and indigenous people’s resistance in East Asia, South Asia and South America. But the paradox is only apparent, inasmuch as the levels of poverty, brutal dispossession, and the massive livelihood struggles awkwardly captured by the notion of ‘informality’ are all the underlying generators of Africa’s extreme but not exceptional hardship and the besieged nature of its organisations for social justice.

If the evocation nothing about us without us! remains pertinent, a subsidiary question – one that reflects directly back on what one might call the reasonable ambitions a Western solidarity campaign – is: what is it that African campaign organisations declare they are about? This is a prickly question. Please indulge a third vignette. I was having a nice dinner with some activist academics from the University of Dar es Salaam and the conversation touched upon the post-Washington Consensus and its subterfuges. It was, we agreed, a moderate re-packaging of the Washington Consensus through weak or bogus qualifiers such as ‘ownership’ and ‘participation’. But, I asked (aware that I was the Westerner at the table), what are the counter-hegemonies that are being silenced and excluded? What ‘Tanzanian’ or, even more boldly, ‘African’ alternative annunciations are bubbling around, potentially insurgent and disruptive? There was no answer to this question, although it seemed easy to return to topics such as the dominance of Western NGOs in civil society, the presence of expatriates in government, the dominance of the Western media and so on.

I am suggesting that it is difficult to identify a ‘grand narrative’ about African struggle of a kind that generates a clear demand for social justice and which connects reasonably well with a set of political agencies within Africa itself. One can simply ideologically assert a ‘Struggle’ and use forms of deduction and imagination to tie examples together even if it is only this cognitive act that actually connects them. Absent this, solidarity remains a rather trepidatious endeavour, defined as much by desire as it is satiety. I am sure this will be disagreeable to some, but I would insist on the diagnostic question: if my characterisation is wrong, what is the grand narrative generated by a group of organisations that might well be characterised as a social movement?

We can go deeper here, to something which is again a recurring theme in Western agonies concerning Africa campaigning. One response to the ‘where’s the potential social movement?’ question is not to attempt an answer but to reject the question. This would be instead to question the nature of the Western solidarity campaigning ‘gaze’, its seeking of recognisable forms of political activism, its expectations and filterings of African realities. Now, it is certainly the case that there is a great deal of detailed research showing that African associational life is massively vibrant, diverse, and vernacular. Notions of accountability and justice, claims to well-being or protection, appeals to the powerful, are mobilisations of collectivities are all taking place but often through hybrid cultural practices which produce ‘thick’ moral economies less easily retrofitted into a global justice campaigning. The most well-known idiom here is eating: leaders who eat too much and the resentments of those who feel that they are not being given a ‘proper’ place at the table. The moral contours of this political idiom are not social justice or even liberal rights-claims even if they might lend themselves to be hybridised as such.

There is a great deal to explore between the stultifying formality of cultural relativism and the universalisms of liberalism and social justice. One suspects that more pragmatic, situated, and ‘dialogic’ approaches would repay far better than searches for the universally-agreed code for a global struggle of the kind that was pervasive during the Cold War. Perhaps we ask ourselves in proximate rather than heroic spirit: where do we start?

Graham Harrison is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and is on the editorial board of the Review of African Political Economy.

The Enlargement of the Global South to the EU

ROAPE

December 4, 2015

By Vassilis K. Fouskas

Over the last fifty years or so, scholars, pundits, politicians and journalists have missed no opportunity to praise, again and again, the virtues of the ‘European project’; its integrating force through its various ‘waves of enlargement’ and by way of increasing prosperity and jobs; the greatness of the project that spearheaded from Europe’s civilised core to an underdeveloped and even ‘semi-barbaric’ periphery (East-Central Europe and the Balkans); and the great opportunity these peripheral regions had been having to make their economies, polities and societies converge towards the developed and civilised core. In fact, many had argued that this convergence was already at hand after the introduction of the common currency, the euro, in 1999 (Greece joined in 2001). To estimate the amount of books and articles written on the issue of ‘European integration’ from WWII to date; or the conferences, seminars, workshops, websites, magazines, newspapers etc. etc. is a completely fruitless exercise and not just because they amount to hundreds of thousands if not millions. It is also fruitless because the so-called ‘European project’ proved to be a mere ‘house of cards’ ready to collapse when the financial crisis of 2007-08 kicked in and spread across the Euro-zone. The ‘civilized’ core was quick to respond to its banking mayhem by displacing the crisis to the periphery through the banking system and by way of using debt as a lever. The crisis exposed the contradictions of the Euro-project drawing clear lines, which pre-existed, between the core and the periphery. Instead of witnessing a convergence towards the ‘civilised’ and ‘developed’ core, the periphery of Europe is experiencing a convergence towards the bottom. Today, Greece’s social economy and the state resemble more its northern Balkan neighbours than Holland or Denmark. It now seems that the Global South is expanding to include large chunks of Europe, hence the title of this article for roape.net.

This article explains the current debt crisis in Greece and seeks to open a dialogue with the developing countries of the Global South (Africa, Latin America, Asia), all of which have faced, or are currently facing, debt problems. The debt is a leverage great powers use on poorer countries to extract political and economic premiums, subjugating the latter on the former via regimes of perpetual dependency. The dependency is chiefly economic and political. But it is also ideological and cultural in that it reproduces a peculiar type of “orientalism” in the minds of the peoples of the periphery by idealising the superiority of the “West” either through the efficacy of its institutions or through the very functioning of the idea of a “superior and stable” currency, in our case, the “Euro”. The “Euro” is not just a form of money, i.e. a unit of account or a monetary medium mediating the act of transaction. In itself it represents a form of identity making the people of the weak periphery to feel as strong and secure as those in the core. The real functioning of the Euro creates dependent cultural identities in the periphery that has great significance when it comes to political elections and critical decisions. Periphery elites themselves, not just ordinary people, are victims of this form of ideological/cultural dependency that stems directly from the ideological functioning of money as a carrier of identity. This article, however, refrains from tackling this aspect of dependency. In general, it remains within a politico-economic framework.

Further, this note’s ambition is to shed light on the movement of Syriza in Greece, a truly left radical movement that came to power in January 2015 breaking up the old political establishment of PASOK (Centre-left) and New Democracy (Centre-right). It seems, however, that even Syriza cannot deliver from positions of power what it promised when in opposition. Apparently, deeper structural forces and constraints are in operation restricting radical political action from positions of governmental power. This article offers some further guidance about how to study the Syriza experiment and what useful lessons can be drawn from it for other progressive movements in Africa and around the globe.

Imperial origins of the Greek debt crisis

Greece is one of the very few European states that never had a modern Empire. It has always been a dependent/subaltern state in the modern imperial chain. Its foundational act was not the result of a movement led by an independent, endogenous national bourgeoisie breaking away from its feudal fetters and establishing its bourgeois institutions and the state. Quite the opposite, modern Greece was born as a vassal state, an artificial geo-political construction at the behest of France and England, whose main purpose was to serve as a base to block the Russian fleet from entering the Mediterranean via the Turkish straits. Greece was founded in 1830 and some 30 or so years ahead of Italy and Germany respectively. But the peasants of the Peloponnese hardly resembled the Junkers of Prussia or the bourgeoisie of Piedmont in Northern Italy. Imperial geo-political competition in the Balkans and the Near/Middle East led to the creation of “modern” states in the region in a similar way that led to the partition of Africa.

Debt was part of the DNA of the Greek state from its inception. Having borrowed large amounts of money from its West European masters to conduct the “war of independence” against the Ottoman Turks in the 1820s, Greece found itself bankrupt already before its foundation as a state. For most of its modern history Greece has been insolvent. What she also experienced was a historical transfer of hegemony from one master to another depending on which imperial power dominated the globe both economically and politically. Soon after the end of WWII, the British transferred Greece’s mastery to the USA. Then, with the entry of Greece to the European economic ‘family’ in 1981, the American factor became slowly replaced by the French-German one and, most recently, by the power that dominates the political economies of the EU and the monetary union, Germany.

Imperialism is, above all, appropriation of international value. It goes hand in glove with creation of debts for the periphery and surpluses for the imperial core, inasmuch as value produced in the global periphery (or South) is transferred to the core via financial means (e.g. loans with usurious interest rates or “investment” in T-bills) or global production networks (e.g. MNCs). What is inherent in the production, circulation and consumption of commodities, whether real (a piece of chocolate) or fictitious (e.g. a bond) is the uneven development of the value-form. Disobedient periphery actors, such as Iraq or Libya, are destined to experience other, extreme forms of subjugation, such as direct military invasions. This has as a result a massive increase in the level of suffering of already poor and deprived peripheral populations.

Many analysts consider that the Greek debt crisis has domestic and not imperial origins. They point out the large fiscal deficits and the profligacy of the state as the main reasons leading to the bankruptcy of Greece and the need to seek humiliating bail-outs from the so-called troika (the EU, the ECB and the IMF). This is not correct. Despite the fact that Greece has had large public deficits before the advent of the current crisis, so did other European countries, such as Italy and Belgium. More to the point, countries that have received bail-outs, such as Spain and Ireland, had surplus budgets. The thesis that the current crisis in Greece and across Euro-zone is fiscal does not stand up to close scrutiny. In fact, the crisis is a typical balance of payments crisis reflecting current account disequilibria caused by the uneven levels of economic and trade development across the Euro-zone. In this respect, the banking sector is crucial in understanding the nature of the crisis.

When the global financial crisis broke out in summer 2007, the European banks found themselves in great difficulties because during the years of financial bonanza, low interest rates and exorbitant profiteering they had acquired large amounts of paper (CDSs, CDOs and other toxic assets) from Wall Street banks, private operators and the City of London, which became valueless overnight. The first European banks to collapse were German banks. German and French banks had themselves bought large quantities of Greek paper, which Greece was using in order to finance its current account deficits and other obligations, such as the national health system and Greece’s large defence budget. The entire chain of financialization got into trouble and de-leveraging became a thorny issue that, in the end, fell on the taxpayer. The troika, among others, asked Greek authorities for bond swaps in two consecutive agreements (2010-12) in order to transfer the debt from the banks and the private sector to official institutions, thus justifying austerity and legitimising fiscal transfers, ie taxpayer’s money and cuts, to servicing the debt. The argument put forth by Germany and the creditors is that “internal devaluation”, i.e. lay-offs in the public sector, pension and wages cuts, reduction of public spending would increase competitiveness and attract investment while decreasing the debt as a percentage of GDP. Five years have passed since these recommendations. It has not worked. When the first set of austerity measures was implemented, the debt/GDP ratio was at 118%. At the moment of writing (September 2015) it is as high as 178%. Unemployment stood at 8% in 2009, but it has risen to 27% today in the wake of “internal devaluation” (a polite phrase for austerity). Obviously, the country’s fiscal condition improved due to austerity, with the Greek budget recording primary surpluses of 1.5% of GDP in the last quarter of 2014, but this is nonsensical given that such surpluses cannot contribute significantly either to debt repayment or to any meaningful regeneration of the economy. After all, the bail-out agreements have tied down any budgetary surpluses to debt repayment, which is absurd. Recent reports by the IMF indicate what the left of Syriza kept saying from the beginning of the crisis, namely that the debt is unsustainable and that without substantial debt relief and investment in the real economic sector Greece would not possibly recover.

Having said this, the EU is not an integrated economy, let alone an integrated polity, and the introduction of the Euro in 1999 created more problems than it solved. The Euro was introduced as a step towards facilitating economic and, eventually, political integration, the immediate aim being to cure currency crisis across member-states, such as the 1992 crisis of the British pound and the Italian lira. None of this became possible. Instead, the Euro-arrangements favoured Germany, which became the EU’s imperial power par excellence by way of recycling its surpluses within the Euro-zone and imposing austerity. Germany’s model is that of low wages, low inflation, budgetary discipline and export-led development. It is this model that Germany wants to implement across the EU and prospective members of the EU. But this, instead of uniting the continent has divided it further. The disintegrative tendencies of the EU are far stronger than the forces of integration and the gap between core and periphery widens. Currency crises take the form of banking and liquidity crises, as the cases of Cyprus and Greece have shown. EU periphery states resemble more the states of East-Central Europe, the Balkans and certain African, Asian and Latin American states, than those of the core of Europe. In fact the largest part of the EU is joining the Global South in a race towards the bottom, even though many parts of the global periphery are now becoming entangled into the economic developmental web of large peripheral powers, such as China and South-East Asia, Brazil, South Africa, Russia and Turkey.

However, the case of Greek debt crisis stands out for two reasons. First, because of the ferocity of the crisis as Greece was vulnerable both in terms of its current account deficits and in terms of its fiscal position. Second, Greece, unlike other European peripheral states, came to experience a truly radical left and anti-austerity movement that rose from 4% of the electorate in the election of 2009 to nearly 40% in 2015. To this interesting ‘peculiarity’ we must now turn.

Why being in office matters

When Francois Mitterrand’s Socialists assumed power in France in 1981 with a Keynesian programme in hand, he and his coalition partners, the Communists, were forced to backtrack. The French currency could not defend its exchange rate and as inflation spiralled out of control, Mitterrand began introducing neo-liberal reforms — the famous U-turn of 1983. Andreas G. Papandreou’s PASOK in Greece also tried to resist neo-liberal globalisation, but its programme was far more radical than Mitterrand’s. Thus, several discontinuities before and after it assumed office occurred and a transmogrified type of socialism took shape in Greece in the 1980s, the most peculiar aspect of which was the introduction of a national health system and other welfare reforms which were financed via domestic and external borrowing, rather than taxation as is the norm in the West. Obviously, this worsened the country’s public debt situation, bringing it up to 100% of GDP.

Let us go a bit further. Before they conquered power in 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks advocated a direct passage to socialism – the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” – confiscation and nationalisation of all land and property and all power to the workers’ and peasants’ councils (the Soviets). Lenin, in particular, despised Taylorism, which in a series of articles in 1913-14, he characterised as the most inhuman capitalist way of organising industrial relations. What did he do after 1917? He introduced the famous “New Economic Policy” and “tax in kind”, advocating the co-existence between the public and private sectors of the economy and he began praising Taylorism as the most advanced method that Soviet Russia needed to adopt in order to increase its productivity, and invited English capitalists to invest in his country through diplomatic channels and various interviews he gave in the then Manchester Guardian. Interestingly, Lenin praised Plekhanov as the best Marxist philosopher of Russia that the youth must study – before 1917, Plekhanov and other Marxists of the Second International were dubbed as “renegades” and “traitors of socialism”.

The conclusion is that being in government matters and it changes things, even if the social force that brings you to power is the poor and working classes. It makes you face the real constraints of capitalism, both national and international, as well as face the limitations in terms of state capacity and the realistic delivery of promises. I explored these scenarios back in the early 1990s, going as far as to define populism as a political strategy of discontinuity before and after the conquest of governmental power[1].

Photo sourced from Wikimedia Commons

The Syriza experiment

And now Syriza enters the stage. Its Salonica programme of September 2014 was a moderate Keynesian set of proposals aiming at alleviating the humanitarian crisis and raising gradually the minimum wage. At the same time, it advocated balanced budgets, administrative reform and withdrew its opposition to NATO. It was expected that the ECB would support this programme, especially since a Syriza government, like all Euro-zone governments, lack Keynesian instruments to implement Keynesian policies. Thus, Syriza came to power with a mild reform and anti-austerity agenda believing that tough negotiations with the troika would bring positive results. Syriza, among others, had hoped that a part of the country’s debt would be written-off and some of the cash flow coming into the country could be directed to productive investment. The effort was very brave but brought no results. This was because the so-called “EMU rules” do not allow flexibility. And they do not allow flexibility because the institutional and ideological bias upon which they are based reads as follows: no wage growth, anti-inflationary policies, budgetary discipline and export-led growth. In other words, the rules are set after Germany’s successful neo-mercantilist economic story which, contrary to the rules of the EU and EMU, it suppressed wages for years in order to make Germany a surplus country and improve its competitive position within the EU and internationally. Germany is now exporting austerity as it first imposed austerity on its own workers. But this austerity is bound to take on different shapes and forms across the Euro-zone and beyond, simply because the levels of economic and political development in each country are vastly different. All EU/EMU countries, and also all candidate countries, are subject to the same discipline and neo-colonial controls. This is what Syriza failed to break in the negotiations and, despite the resounding and heroic victory of the NO vote in the anti-austerity referendum of 5 July, it was in the end forced to backtrack submitting to creditor power. The deal Syriza finally accepted is recessionary; it has no chance in improving the Greek economy as it stands and, as the IMF predicts, the debt/GDP ratio would increase under the new agreement. More to the point, Syriza, like all other left radical movements in 20th century European history, registered a massive retreat, capitulating on every single point it had stated was unnegotiable when in opposition. Effectively, it signed up for a new recessionary Memorandum of Austerity, which includes a 50bn Euros privatization fund that will be replenished by selling public assets and a target of 1% primary surplus for 2015. Curiously, this capitulation came after a triumphant standing in the referendum of 5 July 2015, in which the Greek people was asked to vote if they agree to further austerity. Their answer was a resounding”No”[2].

So far, commentators in various venues have said almost everything about the Greek/Euro-zone crisis. From Bloomberg analysts to Financial Times’ journalists, and from scholars, such as Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin to Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, all major issues have been tackled well and explained competently. Obviously, without Keynesian instruments at the national level and without a European federal state at the European level you cannot have any form of Keynesian policies. Too much reliance on the ECB – which, first and foremost, is a bank – and the “good will of European partners”, coupled with lack of institutional preparation to return to a national currency, brought Syriza’s negotiating team to a deadlock. Others, quite rightly, have argued that there was no real negotiation from the time Syriza assumed office in January 2015. The Germans, the argument goes, wanted regime change as they could not agree with the Greek Finance Minister’s reasonable demands – which included restructuring of the debt, i.e. debt relief. In fact, this insight is correct: after the referendum of 5 July, the Greek PM sacked Finance Minister, Yanis Veroufakis, in order to keep his cabinet in place and avoid being pushed out by the creditors – mainly via financial and media warfare and permanently blocking liquidity to the Greek banks.

The imperial creditors seem to be of the opinion that there is a Greek state in place that can implement, and a Greek society that can accept, the new austerity measures. This is reminiscent of the gruelling rationale behind America’s various wars post-9/11, but also before: invade Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere to bring about liberal democracy, human rights and free market capitalism. This indicates the total ignorance of the actual societies and states they supposedly want to change and improve. In fact, wherever American power went it made conditions worse. Greece and the European periphery should be seen under the same light. Greek political elites, mixed with big comprador and corrupt interests, as well as the institutional materiality of the state as such, have always been fragmented, deeply inefficient and in the service of clientelistic, corrupt and nepotistic deals and practices. But Syriza did not inherit just this. Syriza inherited a no-state, a completely dilapidated administrative apparatus with civil servants terrified about who is next going to lose their job. Society itself, with 27% unemployment and 57% youth unemployment and unpaid salaries for months, exists in a strange combination of anger, radicalization and demoralisation. Recent administrative reforms in municipalities (the “Kallikratis” plan) caused havoc, further distancing the citizen from the state. Add to this the factional warfare within Syriza, despite the election victory in September, and the government and you will have one of the most inefficient “ruling” machines in the West. In other words, Syriza’s state cannot reach the 1% primary surplus fiscal target; it will find it incredibly difficult to effect privatizations and other neo-liberal reforms required by the creditors in order to receive bail-out funds. The new anti-austerity package will fail. Equally and arguably, for the same reason, a debtor-led default and exit from the Euro-zone will fail. A transition to a national currency requires a strong and well-organised state apparatus to lead an impoverished society through hardship to eventually achieve renewal and something positive at the end of a long and arduous journey. I would argue that there is no state capacity in place to hold sway over the implementation of a new austerity package or indeed to buttress and deliver Grexit. So what is to be done?

Proposals

Reluctantly, we can outline only two solutions. The first entails a substantial write-off of the Greek debt of about 40% and a concrete development plan for the country which should take place in parallel with an overhaul of the state machine. Austerity measures may continue but not without immediate cancellation of large parts of the debt, a developmental perspective and modernisation of the state administration. Syriza’s negotiating team must put forth these two points as non-negotiable items for the implementation of the new austerity agenda. To a certain degree, this is also a choice, perhaps the only choice, for Europe. The common currency has no chance of survival if the union is unprepared to move towards a federal state allowing debt write-offs of the periphery, the same way that North America forgave the debt of the South after its victory in the Civil War. That is how the USA came into existence. Here, Greece and the Euro-zone crisis in general offer the creditors a golden opportunity to build a European federal state with the European taxpayer guaranteeing payment of the weaker economies of the union. It is as simple as that. But Germany may stick to its neo-mercantilist policy of low inflation and low wages and refuse debt relief. What, then, for Greece and, for that matter, Europe?

If this eventuality becomes reality, then Greece must default on its debt obligations, restore the independence of its central bank and introduce a new currency in stages. For this to happen successfully, the current Syriza government must open up the debate among civil actors, lay down the problems it faces in terms of state capacity and reform and invite all Greek people to assist to rebuild the state and society on the basis of a new developmental agenda. Here, the Greek government must nationalise the banks; pursue a courageous policy of import-substitution; build on the existing strengths of its economy and modernise all these sectors (aluminium and cement industry, tourism, fishery, solar energy, agriculture and biological agriculture); SMEs, which are the backbone of the Greek economy, need special protection innovation techniques and incentives for developing new patents; and re-design the state apparatus starting from the drafting of a new Constitution. Given the level of inflation that will ensue and the devaluation of the new drachma, imports of raw materials and pharmaceuticals will have to be negotiated with the EU and Russia. Also, the EU, the USA and Russia should be in a position to assist possible challenges to Greece’s sovereignty by Turkey. Apparently, this will also be the only choice left for Europe if it fails to move towards a federation, which is very likely given the gap between core and periphery and the uneven spatial functioning of the value-form: to assist Greece to survive its exit from the EMU, because an impoverished failed state with hundreds of thousands of migrants and on the brink of war with Turkey either in Aegean or Cyprus will blow up not just the EMU but also the EU and NATO itself. In the end, however, any type of socialism, whether democratic or not, is possible, in the first place, in one country only.

Vassilis K. Fouskas is Professor of International Politics & Economics at the University of East London, and the founding editor of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. He has authored, co-authored or edited 11 books and has published dozens of scholarly articles.

Notes

[1] Vassilis K. Fouskas (in Greek) Populism and Modernization. The Exhaustion of the Third Hellenic Republic (Athens: Ideokinissi, 1995). The approach suffers from some problems that we were unable to see but, overall, it captures much of the developments and structural tendencies inherent in any radical political perspective that attempts to disregard systemic constraints inherent in national and international political economy. For a complete account, see Vassilis K. Fouskas and Constantine Dimoulas (2013) Greece, Financialization and the EU. The Political Economy of Debt and Destuction (London and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan)

[2] There is speculation that the referendum happened after the leading group of Syriza under the PM, Alexis Tsipras, succumbed to pressure by the left-wing of the party, the “left platform”, under the leadership of Panagiotis Lafazanis, and that Tsipras himself did not want either the referendum nor knew how to administer its result. In fact, such a result pointed, if anything, to a “default and exit strategy” on the part of Greece, vindicating the “left platform” of Lafazanis and its major theoretical advocate, Costas Lapavitsas. This speculation can be found in the comments and interviews by former Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned immediately after the referendum, his position taken by soft-spoken and moderate, Euclid Tsakalotos.

Hooks Down! Anti-Apartheid Activism and Solidarity among Maritime Unions in the United States and Australia

ROAPE

December 3, 2015

By Peter Cole and Peter Limb

In an era of heightened social, industrial and scholarly connectivity, studying the history of transnational labour activism is increasingly relevant and necessary for scholars who study labour and unions, politics, and political economy—be they historians, economists, or others. Examining social movements within and across national boundaries is all the more appropriate given that African nations’ boundaries largely were drawn by European colonizers. As a result, many social and political movements, especially those for independence, engulfed whole regions of the continent. By the same token, the economic forces and effects of modern-day globalization is a subject that, by definition, exceeds the scope of any one nation; hence, it should come as little surprise that there is a renewed sense of working class internationalism, particularly in the maritime sector that is so central to the neoliberal project. Our work covers both political freedom struggles and economic trade, focusing upon transnational labor activism in Africa. Indeed, Africa is an ideal site in this regard as the continent saw independence struggles often transnational in effort and scope, the most obvious being the struggles across southern Africa from the 1960s until 1994, when the last nation on the subcontinent finally was freed of the shackles of colonialism. This short blog summarizes soon to be published work by both authors.

Workers involved in marine transport (on the waterfront and at sea) have a particularly long and deep history of interest in and solidarity with fellow workers across the proverbial seven seas. Refusing to work cargo (be it called strike, boycott, or some other term) in order to express solidarity with people fighting in another land has been one way that dockworkers and seamen have expressed political and class sympathies. What is not always appreciated is the role of dockworkers and seamen in relation to freedom struggles, none more evident than in the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

Our research compares and contrasts the transnational activism of maritime unions in Australia and the United States in what became the longest and most poignant example of global solidarity activism in the post-World War II era—the fight against apartheid. Inside South Africa, the struggle against apartheid lasted many decades—from 1948 to the early 1990s. The horrors of apartheid along with the nobility of the cause and its leaders inspired millions of people around the world to rally in solidarity with South Africans. Many who joined this global anti-apartheid movement (AAM) were workers and their unions. And among the most visible were maritime unions that were well positioned to exert real influence on the South African state, most dramatically by refusing to unload South African cargo.

In Australia, we examine the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) and the Seamen’s Union of Australia (SUA), and related unions. On the US side, we examine the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), especially Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area, which drove the entire Bay Area AAM and impacted the movement across America.

Boycotting South African goods, San Francisco, 1962 (with permission of ILWU)

The ILWU and Local 10 were learning about and supporting the AMM going back to the 1950s. However, it was in the aftermath of the Soweto student uprising, in 1976, that some Local 10 members, predominantly Pan-Africanists and leftists, formed a rank-and-file committee to support the AAM as well as struggles in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Their greatest effort was an 11-day action in 1984 when they refused to unload South African cargo. With the support of thousands from the Bay Area committee who rallied in solidarity, the Bay Area longshore workers galvanized the Bay Area’s commitment to this cause and made the national news. Nelson Mandela himself thanked the ILWU when he visited Oakland in 1990.

WWF and SUA anti-apartheid actions from 1959 to the early 1990s employed the same tactics, vigorously responding from the start to appeals for boycotts by South African unions and the African National Congress, spurred externally by growing international labour and political contacts, internally by the politics of union leaders, the wider AAM, and exiles. South Africa and Australia were trade rivals and ship visits (as in the US) not that numerous, hence the scope for boycott was limited. Yet, shipping remained an Achilles heel of apartheid that maritime unions exploited. In the 1950s, they had made contact with SACTU through international labour and peace networks, and over the next three decades ties with the liberation movement grew. A combination of politicised union leadership and grassroots activism saw numerous boycotts as well as material solidarity. Also underpinning solidarity were connections between unions and the broad AAM. Maritime unions got on with the fight; they took hard action—and, also as in the US—the brunt of reprisals.

These maritime unions operated in different contexts but not entirely so. In order to more fully appreciate and understand the impact of maritime unions’ contributions to the AAM, we uncover and analyze how they acted in more than one nation. We describe the histories of American and Australian maritime unions’ actions in the AAM. Subsequently, we analyze these actions by exploring a variety of themes including: notions of solidarity among marine transport workers (why they are, as a work group, more likely than most to engage in transnational activism); ideological motivations for solidarity activism (notably, union political orientations); ethnic and race relations among workers (demographics, racial politics in unions, and their views on national and global racial politics); and labour connections that these maritime unions made beyond the waterfront (AFL-CIO, ACTU, WFTU, ICFTU).

SUA anti-apartheid picket, Sydney, ca. 1985 (source: NSW State Library; Search Foundation) — SUA anti-apartheid picket, Sydney, ca. 1985
(source: NSW State Library; Search Foundation)

We also engage with analyses of the global AAM and explains why marine transport workers played such a prominent role. We find both similarities and differences in the labour experiences in Australia and the United States. In both countries, the experience of solidarity actions against the Vietnam War and for other causes helped lay a foundation of international activism. And in both, the nature of maritime work and the transnational contacts it engendered sensitised workers to solidarity activism. However these background factors needed to be acted upon to spur action against apartheid. In Australia, strong Communist Party (CP), and later, in the WWF, Australian Labor Party (ALP) officials led maritime unions and, whilst splits sometimes led to rival maritime branches, involvement in anti-apartheid campaigns was consistent across unions, across leaderships and across parties. Here we ask a deeper question about political consciousness in the long history of labour movements in both countries, as well as the role of grassroots pressure. In the USA, a combination of racial (Pan-African) and left politics (including CP, Trotskyist, and syndicalist strands) explain why rank-and-filers in Local 10 (as opposed to the national leadership) spearheaded the Bay Area’s AAM. In both nations, the purposeful action of the AAM and liberation movement representatives helped to link their struggles with maritime unions and popularize boycotts. The long tradition of solidarity actions also encouraged independent campaigns by maritime unions such as material aid for victims of apartheid and other African liberation movements in southern Africa. Our ongoing work seeks to raise the profile of such labour activism for it has often been underrepresented, for instance in the US literature where attention has primarily focused upon religious and student activism.

A Maritime Unions Against Apartheid poster (1980s) (source: socialhistory.org/en/collections/shipping-research-bureau) — A Maritime Unions Against Apartheid poster (1980s)
(source: socialhistory.org/en/collections/shipping-research-bureau)

Peter Cole is a historian of twentieth-century America, South Africa and comparative history at Western Illinois University and Peter Limb is a historian of twentieth-century Southern Africa and teaches at Michigan State University.

Tributes to Sam Moyo

ROAPE

December 2, 2015

Sam Moyo, who died in car accident in India on 21 November, was a longstanding member and contributor to ROAPE and co-founder and Executive Director of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS) in Harare. Here we post three tributes to Sam. A selection of his ROAPE articles can be found here.

Celebrating a Life

By Tendai Murisa

On Saturday night at approximately 11:45pm Beijing time I received a call from an old friend informing me that Prof Sam Moyo had been involved in a high impact accident in New Delhi and we should pray. I didn’t. For some reason I just felt powerless and all I could do was sing songs of praise but could not sleep, then within the same hour the message came. Sam is no more. Shattered! I did not want to believe it. My or rather our world had just turned upside down. For we have always considered ourselves a privileged lot- the students of Prof Sam Moyo. Zvoradza!

I met Prof Sam Moyo first through his work in the late 1990s and then face to face way back in 2005 when I had just returned home having completed an MA in Development Studies in the UK. I had been asked by Ray Bush to pass greetings to him and the conversation that followed led to me joining the Africa Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS) initially on a three months contract which was eventually extended until 2009. From the first day I realized that Prof Sam – sorry most of us at the institute at that time and even now I supposed were never able to refer to him just as Sam – was a special breed – an international traveller sought after by many others – he was just not our Professor but he literally belonged to the Global South and he took it in his stride and never once complained about travel no matter how difficult or hectic a schedule.

In this piece I will reflect in an eclectic manner on what Sam meant to me and the manner in which he influenced not only me but hopefully our generation of scholars/activists and practitioners. Let me just start off by stating the fact that he was an extra-ordinary scholar who had a larger than life presence who could not be restricted to a single subject or nation but was a global figure with local relevance. He was a giant of extra-ordinary energy and intellect that we all admired and wished to be like him at some point in our lives.

Prof Sam’s Contribution- beyond Just Land Reform

He was way ahead of his time in almost all his writings but let me state from the beginning that Prof’s lifetime of work cannot be adequately treated in these few paragraphs – all I am doing is providing highlights of what still stands out for me in his work (without referring to the texts). He did not see events or phenomena in isolation but instead saw connections with both the immediate past and also what other regions were experiencing. He recognised that the developing South was shaped mostly by policies and programs designed elsewhere and also continuation of the different forms of subjugation from land alienation to slave like labour regimes on commercial farms. As such he always remarked that Zimbabwe is mostly analysed in isolation from what has happening in other countries even her neighbours.

He made an important connection between economic policy and land reform. In his 2000 book Land Reform under Structural Adjustment he argued that ESAP in Zimbabwe had created incentives for large scale commercial farmers and also for diversification into other commercial land use patterns such as wildlife ranching, new export crops but had not adequately brought smallholders into these circuits of production and accumulation instead it had led to growing inequality. ESAP had also created a disincentive for land reform under the willing buyer willing seller model- given the fact that this was probably a period of boom for large scale agriculture thus there was no need to consider giving up land.

Whilst others were busy dismissing the land invasions as an isolated politically driven process he was the first to argue that there was a connection between the invasions of the 2000s and what we had experienced soon after independence all the way to the late 1990s – land invasions of differing intensity and he did not stop there he went to argue that there is a bigger connection between Zimbabwe’s land occupations with what was already happening in the Global South – it was indeed a moment of land occupations in places such as Brazil, India and even South Africa (see his Millennium 2001 article). His collaboration with Paris Yeros (2005) was seminal in many respects especially in bringing these connections to the fore. They also went a step further to demonstrate how the failure of the Structural Adjustment Project across the entire global South had yielded land occupations as the response of the marginalized peasantry. In fact their book on land occupations across the global South published in 2005 and the work of other peasant based movements such as the MST (Brazil), the LPM (South Africa) and war veterans + peasants (Zimbabwe) dramatically brought peasant politics back to the policy agenda. In the process Sam became one of the most sought after scholars in Global South capitals such as New Delhi, Sao Paulo, Mexico etc. and sadly he never received adequate attention in his own country- his work (and indeed that of the AIAS) only began to gain currency after Scoones et al had debunked the myths of collapse because of land reform – which Sam had raised earlier but no one had paid attention preferring instead to tag him as partisan. So sad.

Prof Sam was also very careful to avoid notions of silver bullet prescriptions – with regards to land he argued (in a paper co-authored with Prosper Matondi) that land was a necessary but not sufficient condition for effective rural development – instead there is need for broader agrarian reforms. Land reform (entailing redistribution, tenure reforms and improved utilisation) was only the first set of policy actions to be embarked upon. One of my favourite readings of Prof Sam Moyo is a small monograph published by Sapes Trust back in the 1990s entitled ‘Land and Democracy’. The purpose of land reform had mostly been reduced to addressing livelihoods and in this article he demonstrated how the resolution of the land question would on the one hand break the monopoly power of large scale commercial agriculture, broaden participation in the agrarian economy and in it allow for bottom-up participation within the rural political spaces.

Beyond an analysis of the distribution of land he also devoted significant energy towards an understanding of rural mobilization, power relations and also the social relations of production. He tracked mobilizations for land in terms of the material demands, the class category of those making those demands and contrary to what others have argued he did not seek to romanticize the peasantry but rather engaged critically in an effort to understand their agency so much so that when the 2000 land occupations happened Sam was the only one who could say I saw this coming.

Furthermore Prof Sam (at times working with others) contributed significantly towards our understanding of civil society broadly and NGOs in particular in Zimbabwe. He was very critical of NGOs especially when it came to the manner in which they engaged with land reform policy – which he thought was at the centre of the national question. But to his credit he did not give up on these formations. He volunteered his time to engage in presentations, training and being part of NGO based networks in order to help them improve their positioning and contribution towards land reform.

Sam did not shy away from controversy – he took on many of the so called agrarian experts from the Global North especially when they had made the error of declaring that the Agrarian Question had been resolved. This project was to take up most of his time and led to the establishment of the Journal of the Agrarian South and also was a recurring theme in what has perhaps become the flagship of the AIAS – the Agrarian Summer Institute. I take pride in the fact that Prof entrusted me with the responsibility of organising the very first of these way back in 2009 and I am glad to note it has grown in stature and has become an important platform for agrarian scholars.

On Effectiveness

Initial Observations – The Diary/Calendar

One of the finest aspects (among many others) about Prof Sam Moyo was his availability to everyone who sought his opinion, journalists, students, peers, government officials and the like but it had to be in his diary. Each morning the diary for the day would be prepared and sent and circulated to the managers within AIAS. You did not want to keep Prof waiting. It was Chinese-like efficiency and fidelity to a system that has worked for him for years. If you were not on the diary – no matter who you are – forget it – no chance of meeting. By just looking at his diary you would understand the man’s mission on earth – it was great just to watch him work.

From 0 draft to 9^th draft

Prof Sam was rigor personified. In my five years at the Institute I do not remember a document that did not go from 0 draft up to the 9^th draft with him involved at every stage. I was initially infuriated at the pace at which we were producing our writings but eventually I also caught on. Many of us who were doing our PhD under his guidance (at times he would just volunteer to go through your thesis) benefitted a lot from this approach and he also used that time to reflect more on his work and some of the debates that were coming out.

His presentations were another matter altogether – there were days when we could literally leave the office very late preparing his slides only for him to change the order or the entire presentation! His was a quick mind and you had to learn to follow as a student. He believed in over preparation there was no platform too small for him.

Not only a Leader but a Developer of Leaders

There was no funding partner too big or too small for Prof and we all had to follow his example of professional courtesy, precise reporting, over delivery and also continuous engagement. Within the institute we were all students I observed Prof Moyo teach experts such as Finance Managers and Accountants how to do their jobs. He understood figures and made it easy even for us non-finance people to follow. I quickly came to the realization that working under Sam is an apprenticeship for bigger assignments to come. On his CV he stated that his mission was to train the next generation of scholars. There are many of us who passed through Sam’s hands that are now leading institutions and I am sure my colleagues at TrustAfrica are tired of me always making reference to how I was taught this and that by Prof Moyo. I was taught by the best.

A Man of Integrity and Selfless at all Times

Prof lived by his word. He went beyond the call of duty. I remember at the height of inflation when we were losing several thousands of dollars because we were using the official rate of exchange Prof insisted that we had to abide by the law even if it hurts. Some of us had already devised a number of schemes to beat the system but Prof would have none of it. Whenever we had challenges with financial resources Prof was always the first to volunteer that we do not pay his salary which was already too low compared to his peers working elsewhere. To him it was not about money – if it was he would have secured another job just like that but this was deeper – it was a calling.

On His Independence

Prof Sam was a thinker and even without him saying it he cherished the freedom to write as he liked without the constraints of pleasing any form of authority. He was not anyone’s man. Many will recollect that he spurned the government’s offer of a cabinet position and even the offer of a farm at the height of land reform – although some of us tried to convince him to take it as part of the sustainability plans of AIAS – he would not budge. The famous statement was: ‘I am a scholar and not a politician or even a farmer’. When he left the Southern Africa Regional Institute for Policy Studies (SARIPS) he received many offers to lead regional offices of donor institutions but again he insisted on his being a scholar preferring instead to pour his savings into establishing the AIAS. His writings were non-partisan but instead driven by a deep sense of nationalism which was not subordinated to any political party. Although there were moments where his views seemed to agree with those of a political party he remained critical and carefully watching out for elite capture – he was his own man.

On Industry

Prof Sam worked like he knew that his life on earth will be cut short. In terms of research outputs I do not know of anyone who can match his productivity. When we were preparing our individual annual reports Prof’s one always looked like a little booklets – listing his publications, conference papers he prepared and presented, students he mentored, interviews he gave. He always insisted that we all produce these individual annual reports to make sense of the rush of the previous year and plan better for the next year but we always ended up a bit embarrassed when we presented our 2-3 pagers compared to his 15-20 page reports. He never shied away from assignments and was always prepared to put in more hours than all of us. Anyone who worked with him knows fully well that hitting the midnight oil was part of the routine and not the exception.

Ambassador

Prof Sam Moyo was one of Zimbabwe’s greatest ambassadors. I have had the privilege of travelling with Prof countless times into different cities and sharing platforms with him and he was never intimidated or retreated from his line on the need to understand Zimbabwe in a better way- i.e. the need to understand colonial redress, the need to guard against hyperbole when describing the crisis and stay focused on the real data and yes – he called out the sanctions as harming the economy. But he was realistic enough to note even earlier than others that Zimbabwe needed to normalize her relations with the international community. He was not as others claim an apologetic for the state – he was a nationalist at heart and was more objective in analysing Zimbabwe (even the violence) but within a framework that was embedded in understanding the evolution of colonialism to neo-colonialism, the impact of centre-periphery relations and also the role of international economic development policies on developing countries such as Zimbabwe.

He did not only represent Zimbabwe – he also represented Africa (especially the community of scholars) and excelled at this on the international global stage. A sure ticket of being treated well in places like CLASCO, Third World Forum etc. was to name drop that you worked with Prof Sam!

On Family

Working at AIAS was fun! We were a small family of committed and upcoming scholars – I am sure nothing has changed there. Hardly two months would pass without Prof Sam finding a reason for all of us to gather together with his immediate family for a celebration of sorts. Oh he loved life! His favourite dish was pepper soup and most of the times he would prepare it and insist that everyone at least taste it.

More importantly for me Prof adored his daughters. I personally saw how his two young girls Qondi and Zandi were the only ones who could easily interrupt his schedule. On a recent trip where we travelled together (and sadly the last one) I asked about the girls he was proud that Sibongile is doing very well in the banking sector but maybe because he knew that I started working with him when Qondi and Zandi where in High School – he started telling me about their academic exploits and I had never seen him so proud.

On Generosity

Prof Sam’s generosity knew no boundaries. Ever smiling – in that mischievous but also very disarming way. I can’t remember a time when he ever said no when we asked him for a consultation, to help us complete a task or when others came requesting technical support even without a budget for it. One of his assets which had taken a lifetime to accumulate has always been his friends from all over the world. They were not just people who he had met at a conference but these were his friends. He had a way of connecting and keeping in touch for life. Some of us got the opportunity to meet some of Prof’s close friends – Fred Hendricks, Lungisile, Issa Shivji, Adebayo Olukoshi, Dzodzi Tsikata, Mercia Andrews and the list goes on. He also had his own heroes and you could only beam with admiration as he spoke so glowingly of Archie Mafeje, Thandika Mkandawire, Issa Shivji and I suspect his best friend Praveen Jha. When I heard that he had been involved in an accident it struck me that his best protégé to date – Paris Yeros – would be with him and for sure – the two had become like brothers – in one light moment I called them Marx and Engels. Prof and Paris’ collaboration led to a number of important interventions which have significantly shaped the broad discourse on land and agrarian reform in the global South.

Prof enriched our lives in an immeasurable way. We have lost a caring father, a leader, a mentor, a friend and above all a fine human being.

Prof Sam Moyo- Gone Too Soon- Kamba Hahle. Lala ngoxolo.

Tendai Murisi was an AIAS Research Fellow-Policy Dialogues & Training (2005-2009) and he is currently Executive Director of TrustAfrica.

Remembering a comrade and friend

By Mahmood Mamdani

I no longer recall when exactly I met Sam. Maybe it was in the late 1970s at CODESRIA, or in the early 1980s at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies. The late 1990s, though, was the time we truly got to work together, closely and intensely. The two of us were at the helm of CODESRIA’s leadership, as President and Vice President. The next two years were a time of deep and sharp differences in policy, and it often seemed as if there was no end in sight.

I remember a particularly difficult episode a year down the line. We had an emergency meeting in Dakar but Sam said he could not be there because he was to have a delicate operation in a few days. I explained what was at stake and asked if he could postpone the operation by a week. He warned me that he would not be able to sit for long in his current state. But the next day, he was in Dakar. During the meeting, he kept on shifting the weight of his body from one side to the other, now leaning on one buttock, then on another. He was obviously in great pain, but it never showed on his smiling face.

That was Sam, selfless, committed to a fault, totally reliable. He was the person you would want by your side if you expected hard times ahead. But no matter how difficult the times, as during those years, I never saw him turn vindictive against anyone. Later, we would look back on that period as something of a crossroads in the history of CODESRIA. Then, however, it was hard and painful. It was the kind of ordeal that can forge enduring friendships. Sam was that kind of a friend.

In those years, I also learnt that Sam was a mathematical genius. As soon as we would land in Dakar, he would head for the Accounts office, take charge of all the books, and go through them meticulously. No matter how long it took, 12 or 24 hours, Sam would work until he would have a report ready for discussion between the two of us. Soon, word went around that it would be foolhardy for anyone to try and pull a fast one on Sam.

Students and scholars came to CODESRIA for different reasons, some for the thrill of travel, others to be part of a Pan-African conversation on issues of the day, and yet others to access otherwise scarce resources for research. Sam shared all those motives but, above all, he was among the few who unfailingly gave more than he received. When it came to facing temptation or intimidation, his was a towering presence. Sam stood for integrity and steadfastness, a calm intelligence and a cool deliberation, a level head in a crisis situation, and a free spirit in a party that was sure to follow every difficult episode.

Sam was one of the few who presented a seamless blend of this capacity for sobriety, integrity and joy that marked the CODESRIA crowd – all with a cigarette in one hand no matter the time of day, and a glass of beer at the end of the day. The ground on which this companionship was nurtured was the city of Dakar. We came to it from different corners of the continent, all marginal in one way or another, all looking for freedom, most of all the freedom of expression, as if gasping for oxygen. Out of that common endeavour were born close associations and lasting comrades.

Sam’s major scholarship was in the field of agrarian studies. Always unassuming, he seldom talked of his own scholarly work unless someone raised it first. For me that occasion came in 2008 when the London Review of Books invited me to write a piece on Zimbabwe. The land reform was the big issue at the time. I pulled together whatever studies on the subject I could lay my hands on. Three sources stood above all others as original and reliable: one from the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, another from the University of Western Cape and then Sam’s work at the African Institute of Agrarian Studies in Harare. As I read these sources, and the press reports on their findings, I learnt something about the politics of knowledge production and its recognition in the public sphere. Two facts were crystal clear to me: one, that Sam had been several steps ahead of the others; and, two, that his work was the last to be recognized. It was almost as if the press went by a rule of thumb: when it came to ideas, the chain had to originate in a Western university, and the link go through a South African institution, before it came to an African researcher.

I discussed this with Sam. He smiled, as if to say, what’s new? At home, his critics were at pains to paint him as partisan. If he showed that the land reform had improved the lot of a large number of the landless, those in the opposition discounted it as the claim of someone with the regime. But if he refused to give blanket support to the regime, those with it said he must have hidden links to the opposition. When it came to public policy, Sam took the cue from his research, always fearless, unafraid, and hopeful. He was a voice listened to by all, especially when he was the target of criticism. Whatever their disagreement, all knew that Sam was not susceptible to corruption, and that he would not offer an opinion unless it was informed by deep research.

The last time I saw Sam was at the CODESRIA General Assembly in Dakar in June. Only two months before, we had been together in the city of Hangzhou in China at a conference organized by the Inter-Asia School to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Bandung. The hospitality was overwhelming. Every meal was like a banquet; every plate on the table was renewed before it could be empty; wine and drinks flowed. Sam was relaxed, as he reminisced of our efforts to build CODESRIA over the past decades, and reflected about future plans for the African Institute of Agrarian Studies. I recall this as if it was yesterday: Sam smiling, trusting, reassuring, strong, purposeful, and thoughtful, yet again doing what he was best at, charting a road none had travelled before, but at the same time taking you along.

This is one journey, dear Sam, that you take alone. You leave this world as you came into it, alone, but this world is a better place, and we are better off, because we had the privilege of being part of your world. The loss is great and the heart is heavy, and it is hard and painful to say good-bye. As we grieve for our loss, we also celebrate your life.

Farewell, dear friend, brother, and comrade.

Mahmood Mamdani is the Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) and the Professor of Anthropology, Political Science and African Studies at Columbia University.

Sam Moyo’s Influence

By Chambi Chachage

Sam Moyo is gone. A terrible car accident in India has robbed Africa of one of its finest sons. From Dakar to Dar es Salaam we are mourning the loss of such a profound professor and personality.

As tributes pour from Cape to Cairo, I am moved to share my brief, albeit, profound encounter with someone whose being combined a great sense of African brotherhood/sisterhood and intellectual rigor.

His name must have crossed my mind prior to our first meeting at the Julius Nyerere Intellectual Festival Week at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). As a colleague of the later Professor Seithy Chachage at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research (CODESRIA), his name had to be familiar. It was splashed across publications and papers in our home’s library.

To Chachage, Moyo was such an important voice. When the land crisis began to unravel in Zimbabwe, I was still an undergraduate student at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The situation was so mind-boggling especially when I got the chance to debate it with my schoolmates who hailed from there. My decision to travel by bus from South Africa to Tanzania via Zimbabwe did not help me much to make sense of what was happening especially when I was almost left at the border because of being asked for a bribe.

Hence one of the papers that I tried to skim through to make sense of what was going on in what Mwalimu Nyerere once referred to as the Jewel of Africa was Chachage’s ‘Zimbabwe’s Current Land Crisis: Some Reflections on Its History’. Unknown to the skimmer in me then was that it drew heavily from Sam’s work on the ground. He wrote it 2000 way before many scholars started to acknowledge, even if reluctantly, Sam’s profound insights on ‘land matters’.

Citing Sam Moyo’s (1995) seminal book on ‘The Land Question in Zimbabwe’, Chachage concluded his paper in a ‘prophetic tone’:

‘One thing that is clear, as far as the Zimbabwe crisis is concerned, is the fact that land reform is necessary. Even the opposition party that campaigned against the constitutional change proposals concedes to this fact. More important, as the history outlined above demonstrates, is the fact that a government that abandons the policies of social provisioning and land reforms as a means to redress the historical imbalances is bound to land in the same problems that Zimbabwe is currently facing. Productivist positions and the Darwinist cynicism of the cult of the winner are dangerous in the face of naked inequalities. These forget that even broader economic perspectives suggest that land reform, as it happened in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, for example, ‘lead to an income distribution structure and rural employment benefits conducive for a growing industrial sector.’ It is clear that without the resolution of the land question (which includes the national question in the case of Zimbabwe), the crisis will continue.”

But it was only after I came to know Sam personally later on that I really got to appreciate his vast knowledge and willingness to share with those who thirst for it. If there is someone who has shaped my understanding of ‘land problems’ in Southern Africa then it is him.

Even though we both knew that we are not entirely in the same ‘school of thought’, he was patient, ‘tolerant’ and ‘open-minded’ enough to interact with me without necessarily imposing his ‘old Marxist’ perspective on me. As I go through our exchanges I can almost sense the dilemma and zeal to uphold the principle of academic ‘freedom’ while maintaining the urge for ‘recruiting’.

When I asked ‘Why are Marxists/Leftists obsessed with Class Analysis at the expense of Cultural Analysis?’ he thus responded:

‘As a self-proclaimed Marxist too, I have no problems with analysing culture; but I would think that one has to examine the dynamic structural and social conditions under which culture (which is not static) is produced or evolves. Moreover, many aspects of culture have an ideological value or purpose, and they can become commodified, and these tendencies make ‘culture’ amenable to various hegemonic projects, including the dominance of neoliberal imperialist agendas. But I admit many Marxists understudy culture, and even ignore its existence and purpose, when dealing with class analysis!’

Little wonder when I had to choose between two universities in the US to pursue my PhD studies in 2011, he tried to convince me to go to the one where a couple of his ‘lifelong Marxist’ colleagues were teaching. In a humorous way, he pointed out that the other one is simply basking in its old glory like those folks who invoke their successful past as a cover-up for their present fall from grace. Yet after I had made a decision to go there anyway, he wished me luck after asking: ‘When do you go to the fountain of knowledge?’

Nevertheless that fountain did not really quench the thirst for the knowledge that Sam was busily disseminating in the ‘Global South.’ No wonder we were both so glad when I took a short course on ‘The Political Economy of Natural Resources’ in June 2015 at the Nyerere Resource Center (NRC/KAVAZI) in Dar. Little did I know that will be the last time I see him face-to-face and hear him give a lecture ‘live’. Taken by his take on the ‘Theory of Rent’, I jotted the following comments on top of my head in an online public debate:

‘Someone – I think, Sam Moyo – has attempted to define financial outflows in terms of the rent theory’s dichotomy of ‘ground’ and ‘differential’ rents. By doing so, one realises that there is a thin line between the ‘licit’ and the ‘illicit’ or the ‘legal’ and the ‘illegal’. To put it simply, in the context of the debate below, the TNCs/FDIs are ‘licitly/legally authorised’ to even collect (large) part/share of the (absolute) ‘ground’ rent from the land and natural resources that belong to the people/places they are ‘investing’ their ‘capital’ in. In this regard, I agree that this is not simply semantics. Preoccupation with the ‘illicit’ masks the ‘licit’. Both are draining Africa(ns).’

After his ‘heavy’ lecturers all I wanted was to rush home to cool my brain. But he insisted that I join them for a drink and snack. It was our ‘last supper’. Afterwards, I forwarded to all an article that we only passingly discussed in the course but which was not in the reader. His response to my email was brief but now so memorable:

‘Thanks comrade Chambi. It was good to see you after so long!’

Ever reading and learning, Sam asked me to email him copies of some of the articles in the course reader that he did not have in his collections. I promised to do so. But the procrastinator in me kept getting on my way. Feeling guilty, I sent him a quick email to let him know I will do so asap. Alas, his “Thanks” was the last email I got from him. For five months I travelled across three continents with the scrap paper below that I had jotted down names of the authors of those articles. While I was finally feeling like fulfilling the promise I had made, unknowingly to me, he was laying in a hospital bed fighting for the life yet in him and breathing his last.

Under such a skewed political economy of knowledge production and recognition, it is high time that we acknowledge our African scholars and their ground-breaking works. It is so refreshing to read, the tributes that Bella Matambanadzo, Alex Magaisa and Godfrey Massay have written to their mentor and friend, Sam. It is a testament to his profound intellectual nurturing and sharing.

Deservingly, in memory of his role the African Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS) that he co-founded is now considering renaming the annual summer school that it holds in collaboration with institutions like the Land Rights Research and Resources Institute, the Sam Moyo Annual Agrarian Summer School. May his fiery Pan-African legacy live on and on.

Farewell Comrade Sam. We will keep the torch burning. Amen.

Chambi Chachage is the editor, together with Annar Cassam, of Africa’s Liberation: The Legacy of Nyerere. He contributes to Pambazuka News and co-moderates Wanazuoni: Tanzania’s Intellectuals. He is completing his PhD at Harvard.

Africa Beyond the West: BRICS and the Global South

ROAPE

December 2, 2015

Compiled by David Simon

The conference Southern Africa Beyond the West was organised and run by the Journal of Southern African Studies, the Review of African Political Economy and the British Institute of Eastern Africa. In addition to this report a large number of the conference sessions were filmed by roape.net. A limited selection of keynote addresses and interviews with participants and speakers are available on this site and a fuller selection of panel discussions on our YouTube channel. This detailed summary of the conference has been compiled by David Simon.

The Archaeological Evidence for Southern African Trade and Contact

The purpose of holding this panel right at the beginning of the conference was to channel the attention of the conference delegates, and their subsequent discussions, around the important point that the networks of trade, communication, contact and exchange that are often referred to rather casually today as ‘globalisation’ are not something new. The Southern African region, indeed sub-Saharan Africa more generally has been interconnected in diverse and dynamic ways with the rest of the world for millennia. And if this is true, then to properly understand what ‘globalisation’ today might be about, there is need to be aware of these deeper historical patterns, and for that we need archaeology, as well as history. And so the purpose of this panel was to demonstrate, discuss and consider some of the enormous wealth of archaeological work that has been done on pre-colonial trade networks that existed across the continent, and to consider the considerable work that still needs to be done in this field. Prof. Innocent Pikirayi opened the panel with his paper “Trade, Globalisation and the Archaic state in Southern Africa” which examined the role of trade links between the southern Africa state societies of the middle Limpopo valley and the southern regions of the Zimbabwe plateau, Eastern Africa and Asia between the first millennium and the middle of the second millennium. His argument was that while these states witnessed phenomenal growth and expansion that was propelled by this trade, their demise, while due to multiple, complexity factors, was perhaps also primarily triggered by changing patterns of these long distance, regional and inter-continental trade links, particularly those involving precious commodities like gold. Thus he concluded the ‘dynamics of ancient state development and decline associated with the archaic state cannot be completely dissociated from increasing connectedness with societies in the continent of Asia, and later, Europe’. Pikirayi’s paper set the scene and broader context for the following papers in the panel. He was immediately followed by Prof. Edwin Wilmsen’s paper which focused attention on trades in bangles and beads between the Indian Ocean region and Southern Africa. Wilmsen discussed the different routes that were involved, and the reciprocal nature of trade during the late first to middle second millennium, which amounted to ‘an early form of globalization encompassing the entire Indian ocean province, including its Persian gulf embayment, and, at times, across to West Africa where a royal tomb at Igbo Ukwu contained thousands of the same kind of beads found at contemporary southern Africa sites’. Ted Pollard’s paper followed, examining the different ports on the East African coast that Swahili traders used in the Indian ocean trading system between the seventh and the fifteenth century, which developed into a sophisticated and long enduring maritime culture, with long lasting effects. Ashley Coutu’s paper followed, focusing specific attention on the use of different bio-archaeological techniques (ZoomS and Isotope analysis) to trace the growth of different ivory trade routes and sources, and changing use of different species of trade ivory (including hippo, warthog as well as elephant) between southern and eastern Africa and places as distant as Iran, India and China, between 800 and 1500 AD, a period when this trade witnessed significant expansion. The panel was then completed and further complemented by Nicholas Nikis and Alexandre Livingstone Smiths’ paper, which focused on another very significant trade commodity in the region during the 2^nd millennium AD, copper, and the exchange networks that this engendered in southern central Africa, particularly from the copper belt region of present day Zambia.

Joost Fontein

Cities and Trading Networks Today

This panel consisted of a keynote speech followed by a session with five papers. The keynote by Deborah Potts reflected on some ways in which the ideas of comparative urbanism might be applied in the context of studying urban processes and urban residents’ welfare in southern African countries in comparison to the BRIC countries. Key themes were the different ways in which the current neoliberal phase of capitalism had affected urban societies in these different countries, the different mixes of capitalism practised, and the emergence of some elements of state-financed economic security systems for vulnerable urban populations in some countries, including South Africa and Brazil.

Four of the papers in the panel looked at ways in which China, Brazil and/or South Africa were influencing urban developments in Zambian or Mozambican cities, and one analysed Chinese influences on Johannesburg and the nature of Chinese immigrants’ residential patterns there. Much analysis was about how significant increases in goods traded from China, and sometimes also wholesaled and retailed within southern African cities by Chinese immigrants, was influencing urban processes in the region. There was considerable discussion about how urban spaces were being reshaped by Chinese-influenced retail developments (in Johannesburg) or South African retail developments (in Lusaka) and how this could be thought of in terms of ‘worlding’ of cities (cf Simone) or related to conceptualising cities as assemblages. Chinese investments in mega-infrastructural developments were also discussed. Ferguson’s ideas about how capital in the contemporary capitalist era ‘hops’ between specific (often urban) enclaves, rather than flows, leaving spaces between excluded, were also much alluded to in terms of the impacts on urban populations’ welfare and increasing socio-spatial divisions.

The ways in which processes of globalisation and increased trade with and through non-western societies has created both winners and losers in southern African urban societies were exemplified by the two papers which looked specifically at African urban workers: porters in Kapiri Mposhi on the Tazara railway, and traders in Maputo.

Brazil’s attempts to provide various forms of urban development advice to Mozambique via city to city projects was generally seen as positive in Mozambique (albeit the impact appeared limited as yet and Brazil was probably using the programmes partly as an exercise in ‘soft power’) in part because ‘traditional’ western donors still provided more material aid, which remains crucial. The importance of state-civil society relationships for making certain types of urban planning interventions successful in Brazil was also increasingly becoming apparent as an obstacle in this South-South exercise in policy transfer.

Deborah Potts

Cultural Transnationalism

This panel explored cultural flows across the BRICS countries and evaluated the impact of the BRICS paradigm on Southern Africa – principally refracted through South Africa’s relationship on neighbouring countries – through different lenses (art, literature, media). All the papers touched on how South Africa’s emergence in BRICS has built on and complicated pre-existing relationships in the region. Moreover, all five papers captured how culture has sought to mobilise a new local agency and map new local geographies in the wake of the imagined threats and appeals posed by the rise of the wider BRICS system.

The papers and the brief discussion that followed invited further thinking on points including: 1) How the existing politics of labelling and culture’s points of reference need to be re-considered. How valid are previous categories of race, patriarchy oppression, and religion now BRICS has moved beyond the western hegemonic position of reference?; 2) How the human, place and lived moment or constantly in changing dialogue and implicated in transnational flows; 3) The need to look again at marginalisation and how BRICS is affecting it: is it easing marginalisation or mobilising it further?

“The ‘Bees-Knees’ Factor: An Evaluation of South Africa’s Influence of Zambia Arts”

Raised questions of how Africa views South Africa as a BRICS member.
Framed his talk around (former Deputy President) Guy Scott’s comments that SA is backward in historical development and thinks it’s the bees knees yet is often the cause of trouble. Scott also took issue with SA being in BRICS, claiming it an inferior member of the group that should instead concentrate on Africa.
SA xenophobia in 2015 was used as an example by some to support Scott – though no Zambians were hurt it was still taken personally by some because of the role Zambia played in the anti-apartheid struggle.
He spoke of his personal experiences of the ANC being part of the Zambian community. He lived next to banned ANC members in Lusaka during apartheid. They were a risk yet brought some safety.
Brief mention was made of SA arrogance during apartheid.
Important to note that despite Scott’s view, SA remains a big source of FDI in Zambia.
The talk moved briefly and broadly towards art and culture.
There is little SA influence in theatre or film (mainly Nigerian), though SA music has a significant presence.
Zambia and SA have an asymmetric economic relationship but this is not the same in the arts, where its influence is far less apparent.

Cheela Chilala

“Towards a Politial Poetics of Waste in South Africa, India and Brazil”

Talk concentrated on junk as the afterlife of the community.
Nothing is rendered dead but has its own lifecycles.
How junk produces us?
Examples in her paper were often based around the urban poor.
The South Ocean gyre provided a way to look at the flows across the different BRICS cultures.
First example (SA): Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010). The poetic form is used to convey the dense materiality of objects. Also alerts us to our own bodies and how we can become trash.
Second example (SA): Portrait of Keys by Ivan Vladislavic. The presentation of disorderly junk mobilises its marginality. The non-linear text also maps Johannesburg’s impenetrable nature.
Coins the useful critical phrase, ‘Thing Power’.
Third example (Brazil): Vik Muniz (visual artist). Has displayed series of photographs entitled Pictures of Garbage.
Fourth example (Brazil): Wasteland (film). Makes comparisons of this Brazilian portrayal to the film Slum Dog Millionaire set in Mumbai.
Fifth example (India): How to get Filthy Rich in Rising India. Representations of junk work differently here, especially when compared to Vladislavic.

Megan Jones

“The Love-Hate Relationship: Discourses on the Chinese Presence in Zambia as Reflected in the Media”

Discussed how the Zambian media perceive China’s role in Zambia.
The long history of relations between the two countries has been dominated by mixed feelings.
Othering and stereotypes (both positive and negative) are becoming more prominent.
Negative stereotypes: foreignization, economic threat (causing moral panic), lawless, cultural eccentrics
Positive stereotypes: key development partners.

Mildred Nkolola-Wakumelo

“John Keonakeefe Mohl and the Bechuanaland Protectorate: The Transfrontier Career of a Black South African Landscape Painter”

Mohl’s art was initially the result of a dialogue between Berlin and London missionary schools that both wanted to maximise his talent.
The paintings Mohl displayed when returning from art school in Dusseldorf in 1936 were very political acts.
Mohl had a bleak vision of SA.

Neil Parsons

“Kujoni: The Production of South Africa as a Part of the National Imaginary in Malawian Writing”

Explored how SA is imagined in Malawian literature.
Perceived the dichotomous conflict between representations of Old and New Africa to be too narrow.
Argues satire rejuvenates the impact of modernity on rural culture.
SA is seen as part of a transnational imagination.
Worried that literatures may start to re-establish centre/periphery relations as SA joins BRICS because it would erase local agency, with culture and consumption frequently judged in relation to and through imports from the South African and wider BRICS centre.
His focused on one novel, Jingala by Malawain author Legson Kayira that explored the relationship between those who stayed at home in Malawi and returning migrant workers.

The migrants’ return created an imagined geography, which often reduced South Africa to Johannesburg and had a distinct absence of the rural.

Mpalive-Hangson Msiska

Natures of Violence: Spaces of Misrule in Contemporary BRICS Literature

Overall, the panel explored the representation of political violence in cultural forms, mostly in literature and song, in contemporary BRICS formations. Altogether, Michael Wassels’ and Tom Penfold’s papers focussed on novels from Brazil, South Africa and India whereas Patience Mususa’s and Liz Gunner’s concentrated on how the song genre is employed in Zambia, Brazil and South Africa in highlighting oppressive social and political relations.

Michael Wessels, ‘Representations of Political Violence in Indian Literature in English.’ Wassels’ paper examined the representation of political violence in writing from India. There was some comparative reference to South Africa, but, primarily, it focussed on a diverse range of works from India engaging with the theme of violence. It noted that a number of texts have illuminated the institutionalised control of ‘reproductive and labour power.’ After a complex theorisation of violence, with reference to Fanon, Marx, Zizek and Althusser, among others, the paper argued that one could isolate two forms of violence: systemic and revolutionary, with the first defined as a form of subjugation and subjection and the latter, as a means of transformation of the status quo. However, the paper was more interested in revolutionary violence, especially in the effects on individuals, family and community of resisting institutionalised violence. It was pointed out that resistance was often contained violently, as in the case of the two lovers engaged in an inter-caste relationship in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. By and large, as the paper pointed out, there was some ambivalence towards revolutionary violence, particularly armed struggle, though it was sometimes seen as the only course available to the oppressed.

Tom Penfold, ‘”A Specific Kind of Violence”: Insanity and Identity in Contemporary Brazilian and South African Literature.’ Penfold’s paper focussed on the relationship between madness and identity in two novels, one from Brazil and another from South Africa. It argued that, as both Brazil and South Africa have undergone the transition from oppressive regimes to multi-party democracy, some sections of society in both countries have felt marginalised and that fact is reflected in some of the literary texts, for instance, in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (South African) and Rodrigo Leao De Souza’s All Dogs are Blue (Brazilian). It explored how such structural changes impinged on the domain of affect and the everyday, as citizens struggle to fashion new forms of self-identity in parallel with their nations’ quests for new roles on the world stage.

Interestingly, the paper suggests that such madness cannot be ‘treated’ or ameliorated by addressing the issue of marginalisation itself, but it is rather a form of violence endemic to ‘troubled societies.’ It also acknowledged the aesthetic possibilities offered by madness through its sanctioning of transgressive forms.

Patience Mususa, ‘Narratives of Subversion and Order in Zambian Political Song.’ The paper explored the use of song in the public sphere in Zambia. Additionally, it sought to indicate the ways in which the song genre offered a performative space which makes certain forms of knowledge about society possible. Mususa contended that in Zambia, songs can be read as narratives of nation-making. They offer a framework for understanding the performative of nation-making. She looked at different forms of nation-making narratives, for example, the state-sponsored nation-building narratives, captured in the slogan, ‘one Zambia, one nation,’ which inaugurated the Post-colonial state and is still widely used in the media, particularly broadcast media to articulate a supposedly collective national ideal.

We were also informed that there are songs which provide a critique of the state, subverting official narratives of nation-making, through such devices as irony and mockery, seen, for instance, in the popular music of Paul Ngozi. The paper concluded with a recent instance of appropriation and subversive adaptation of an old song in which a migrant returns from Harare with nothing to show for his long stay in a supposedly richer country. In its reconstitution the song bemoans the poverty of political vision in the current leadership, especially the President.

Liz Gunner, ‘Songs of Comfort and Misrule: Political Song and the South.’ Gunner’s paper compared the use of song in Brazil and South Africa, arguing that in both countries, the song has historically been used to counter state violence, rendering the political imagination of the excluded. It examined the historical development of some song-forms, especially Samba and demonstrated how it had arisen as an attempt to articulate the concerns of the marginalised, but eventually moved to the centre, as its power of social and political critique became irrepressible. Gunner further noted that in Chico Buarque’s songs, composed during the dictatorship, the political resonance of the songs is communicated not directly through the lyrics, but suggestively by covert reference to the political and historical contexts.

The paper also explored the political use of song in South African political discourse during the Anti-Apartheid struggle and after. Here, as well, the song was seen as an instrument of resistance for the marginalised. Zuma was singled out as one of the politicians adept at exploiting the power of song for popular appeal and making ordinary people feel included in public spaces of political discourse. However, in the Post-Apartheid era, the song’s oppositional force has been appropriated, for instance, by Zuma for legitimation of misrule.

Conclusion

In general, the papers pointed to the importance of reading the social and the political present of the BRICS countries in the contemporary cultural expressions, as it is in such spaces that something approximating a an unofficial documentation and critique of the affective social and political tension between personal and state-driven desires emerges. It was also clear that the study of the BRICS countries needed to be grounded in a good understanding of how they are to a large extent constituted by particular features of their past, especially, the violent past, on the one hand and, on the other, spaces of resistance that had sought to counteract such violence as a prelude to a future in which such state violence could be constrained by the rule of law.

Mpalive Msiska

Southern African liberation movements’ transnational connections

The first sub-panel on the history of Southern African liberation movements’ transnational connections focused on Zimbabwe. Gerald Mazarire of Midlands State University in Gweru provided an analysis of ZANU’s External Networks, explaining the interaction between the movement’s internal dynamics and the support it received from both regional hosting nations and those that provided military training and political support internationally. Blessing Miles-Phiri of the University of Oxford focused on ZANU’s relations with Frelimo in the mid-1970s, arguing that the extent of Frelimo influence over ZANU decision-making has been overstated and instead stressing the agency of ZANU and ZANLA leaders in shaping the position of their movement both militarily and in the Lancaster House negotiations. In the third and final paper, Jocelyn Alexander (Oxford) and JoAnn McGregor (Sussex) presented research on the experience of Zanla veterans of training in the Soviet Union, based on a revealing set of interviews.

A number of themes emerged from the papers and the lively discussion that followed: these transnational connections were shaped by individual and collective networks shaped by overlapping ideological, organisational and personalised rivalries and relationships, the entangling of which is challenging for researchers
the interplay between liberation movements and host nations, and the extent to which each shaped this relationship, is relevant not only to the Zimbabwean case but also to the hosting of movements across southern and central Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s
researchers are moving from a focus on the political history of liberation movements to a social history of the lived experience of their members, providing new insights into a history of Africa’s ‘Cold War’
this is based on increased though still uneven access to archives including those from the former Communist Bloc, which are interlinked with interviews, memoirs and other personal sources reflecting the African side of the story – historians need to find innovative ways of bringing together these bodies of evidence.

Miles Larmer

The BRICS’ Impact on the Development of Knowledge Systems in Southern Africa

Felix Phiri (Tangaza University College, Nairobi), ‘The Impact of India and South Africa on the Development of Islam in Southern Africa.‘ The paper looked at Islam in the context of old and new triangular relations between South Africa, Zambia and India in which the impact of South Africa and India on the development of Islam in Zambia on balance seems to be incidental.

Retief Muller (University of Stellenbosch), ‘Knowledge Systems in Tension: South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church’s Missionary Enterprise in Nyasaland/ Malawi and the Indigenous Response.’ The second paper on the panel related to South Africa’s old and new ‘knowledge systems’ that have created tensions with Malawians historically and contemporarily. It argued that the historical missionary experience could have provided South Africa with lessons in dealing with its current ´pan-African’ experiences.

Tianjun Hou, ‘Identifying Barriers to Technology Transfers in Africa: lessons from a Chinese hydropower project in Zambia.’ This paper focused on the barriers to technology transfer specifically in the context of a Chinese hydropower project in contemporary Zambia. Varying forms of bureaucracy, language and knowledge levels seen to be in the way of a possible transfer of knowledge.

The discussion centred on reasons why knowledge transfers have always appeared to have been limited. It was suggested that we should not confine this to the current Chinese-Africa experience, but regard it as a more general trend that seems to put barriers into these transfers. Genuine partnerships that go beyond the lifespan of grand projects were seen as one way of overcoming these barriers. The speakers were urged to make a more clear distinction between the interactions and impacts- or lack thereof- of communities versus whole nations. In other words, can we speak of Africa’s interaction with India as a whole, or is simply limited to interactions with Indian communities. Hou was confronted with the most burning question as to why Zambia is facing the worst load shedding in its history, so shortly after the installation of the new turbines. What does it tells us about inadequate cooperation and implementation of technological programs.

Marja Hinfelaar

Lessons from African and BRICS Experience: Biodiversity and Biopiracy

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) the loss of plant and animal biodiversity is the ‘second greatest extinction’ since the demise of the dinosaurs 63 million years ago. Yet the continent of Africa remains ecologically diverse, with five of the twenty global centres of plant diversity. This session was unique in the conference in addressing Southern Africa’s agroecology through case studies of Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The four detailed studies agreed that understanding of Southern African agriculture had to rely on specificities that nuance the diversity; macro or structural analyses are too general, similar to large scale monoculture as a failed model for the continent.

The papers addressed the impact of agricultural programmes on the livelihoods of those involved, evaluating the mixed results. For knowledge and skills transfers, for example, the exchange with the Chinese in Zambia seemed to work, but not the Brazilian projects in Mozambique. The community seed banks in Zimbabwe share knowledge, extending the skills. But corporate interests are increasing biopiracy, the theft of genetic resources as well as the knowledge and skills related to their use.

Carol Thompson

Development Paradigms in Southern African

The four presentations in this panel offered a mix of perspectives and approaches for looking at different development paradigms from the South. Taking different case studies, the presentations each touched on selected elements that reflect the development of ‘South’ thinking and its propagation in the South. In their diverse ways, they reflect that there should not be a one single paradigm, which is seen as the only right lens for viewing development; ‘South’ thinking is an important and concrete alternative view.

Emerging from the conference discussions that followed the four presentations, a few comments and suggestions were forwarded for the consideration of the different papers, where applicable: (i) perhaps it could be clarified how countries in the South, particularly in southern African are making movement towards the concept of income grants; (ii) the extent to which “Ubuntu” can be taken as universal across African and an agent for development (as opposed to being a philosophy) could be expanded upon; (iii) perhaps it could be explained how the ingredients of ‘South’ development have been systematically elaborated in development paradigms and how relevant these descriptions are for Africa in particular; and (iv) the reactions in southern Africa to the proliferation of Confucius Institutes in many countries could be explored further.

Caesar Cheelo

Final Day Roundtable

The panel comprised seven speakers, chaired by David Simon, who opened by contextualising the timeliness and importance of the Roundtable through sketching some of the intellectual currents and key moments and landmark contributions to postmodern, postcolonial and southern theory debates, including the Comaroffs’ book. The speakers, Trevor Ngwane (Univ of Johannesburg), Ceasar Cheelo (SAIPAR and ZIPAR), Wheeler Winstead (Howard University), Portia Kaja (Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe), Blessings Chissinga (Chancellor College, Univ of Malawi), Muna Ndulo (Cornell University and SAIPAR) and Patience Musasa (UCT), all provided complementary and provocative interventions, reflecting their respective professional and personal positionalities. This stimulated engaged debate with the audience and, perhaps inevitably, no wide agreement was reached beyond recognition of the importance of the issues and the need for complementary knowledges and ways of seeing and doing if the intellectual, policy and practical contradictions and logjams we all confront are to be transcended in any meaningful way.

David Simon

Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong

ROAPE

December 1, 2015

By Abiodun Olamosu

Morten Jerven Africa: Why the Economist Got it Wrong (London, Zed Books: 2015)

This book provide a critical review of the recent economic history of Africa. He argues that, for most of the past two decades, mainstream economists have been trying to explain the chronic failure of economic growth in Africa. In contrast, during the 1950s, the 1960s and even into the 1970s many African economies actually grew rapidly, but this development was subsequently overshadowed by the economic problems of the 1980s and 1990s.

In recent years, this pessimism has changed to the undue optimism of ‘Africa Rising’ with sustained economic growth in a situation which is unlikely to be replicated or sustained for very long. However, per capita GDP in Africa is still way below that in the industrialised countries. The dominant reason for this is held to be bad governance and poor institutions, but this argument may be overstated, for example, the Chinese economy has clearly expanded massively in recent years without good governance in the western sense.

Morten’s main message is quite simple. He argues that we “need to rephrase the central research question about African economic growth. The question is not ‘Why has Africa failed?’ but ‘Why did African economies grow and then decline only to grow again?’” (page 8).

The encouragement for a critical historic reading of African economic is useful, but Morton does not go far enough. He recognises that the “GDP numbers tell us too little about what has really happened or about whether living conditions on the African continent are improving” (page 5). But then he says little to differentiate between average economic growth of a region and its impact on the 99% or even the bottom 50% of the population.

Recent economic growth in Africa has taken place in societies that are significantly more unequal than they were in the 1960s. As a result, most of the recent economic growth has been grabbed by the already rich ruling elite. Many Africans are still living in chronic poverty which is not significantly better than when they gained independence in the nineteen sixties. Redistribution of wealth and income resulting from collective action by the working class and other poor people of Africa would actually achieve significant poverty reduction, something that the economic growth of recent years has not achieved.

Morten also points out that the economic data on Africa is relatively sparse and inaccurate (but then uses this as an excuse for little real action having been taken on poverty reduction). As a result of this poor data, poor theories are developed, especially about the poor of the continent. Although Morten does not take this final step, he does acknowledge that some of the supposed causes of poor economic growth are better seen as symptoms of growing poverty. The real value of public servants’ salaries reduced significantly in the 1980s across many African countries leading to increased corruption and a deterioration in governance.

Morten provides a very useful explanation or argument of why western policies or technologies cannot simply be grafted onto the current reality of Africa. Was it really poor political institutions that explain why the plough, for example, was not adopted more widely and more quickly across Africa? Morten answers with three simple propositions. First, trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness, carried by the tsetse fly, is endemic to large areas of sub-Saharan Africa except for South Africa. At least in the core tropical forest zone, its prevalence made it impossible to keep cattle and so the plough was not efficient. Second land was relatively abundant and so shifting cultivation was still possible and there was no incentive to adopt labour intensive practices like ploughing. Finally, tropical soils are fertile only to a shallow depth and the risk of erosion is significantly increased through the adoption of ploughing. A similar effect was dramatically shown in the Great Plains of America in the 1930s when millions of acres of natural grassland was ploughed to plant wheat. The result was the Dust Bowl. This is an important lesson which many aid agencies have yet to learn. There are no simple or standard answers, for example, aspects of ‘good governance’ which should just be adopted across sub-Saharan Africa. Successful reform is complex and has to fit and be appropriate for local conditions.

As we outlined in our recent paper on the economic history of Africa since independence[1], Morten accepts that Africa’s economic growth failure in the 1980s and 1990s happened because of a combination of external economic shocks and (as he understates) “a less-than-perfect policy response” (page 125). The result, as Morton accepts, were a series of misguided structural adjustment policies (SAPs). Dependence on world markets for primary commodity exports lead to a convergence of negative economic performance in the 1980s, with only a few exceptions. African economies embarked on relatively homogenous policies that were not suited to heterogeneous country conditions.

Morten, dismisses Karl Marx, by saying that he wrote that “the more developed countries showed the last developed the image of their own future” (132), but that this interpretation of economic development has been debunked timeline again. Despite this, there is much that we can learn from Morten’s short book, especially his encouragement for non-economists to read economics more critically and the need to analyse the specific conditions of individual African economies rather than generalising from the European experience.

We have to properly understand actual economic history and how and why different institutions have developed and the subtle nuances between. As Morten concludes, we should focus on how African economies work rather than only explaining why they don’t. However, this book is only a step in the right direction, we still need to develop a deeper understanding of African economies from the point of view of the poor and working classes and how their collective action could help to bring about the fundamental change and redistribution of wealth and power that is so badly needed.

Abiodun Olamosu is a trade unionist and activist from Nigeria.

Notes

[1] Abiodun Olamosu (2015) “Africa rising? The economic history of sub-Saharan Africa”, International Socialism, Issue: 146

Planetary Natures Conference

ROAPE

December 1, 2015

By Elisa Greco

The conference revolved around the discussion of world-ecology, elaborated by Jason Moore as a theory which builds on world system theory by problematising the Cartesian dualism (society/nature) and recognising that capitalism depends on appropriations of cheap natures. Remarkably, all the attendees were considerably familiar with the “red and green” intellectual tradition which has re-read Marx as an environmental thinker. In the opening plenary, Christian Parenti addressed environmental activists and radical scholars in the US by arguing that this persistent fear or dismissal of the importance of addressing the state is counterproductive, because the state is the only entity which has sufficient political legitimacy to respond on an appropriate scale. Larry Lohmann responded with a contribution on exactly that kind horizontal actions – “communing and re-commoning” – and stressed the correlation between the rise of fossil fuel based production and alienated labour under capitalist industrial production, going as far as saying that struggles for the commons are “all in a sense labour struggles”.

Two discussions recurred throughout the conference: on the pitfalls of horizontalism in the left; and on catastrophism – the idea that capital will reach its outer physical limits by itself and thus will self-destruct without the need for political mobilisation – on which Sheila Lilley gave an excellent closing lecture on the last day. Plenaries were all remarkable, with speakers from academia, journalism and activism alike, like Tony Weis, Harriet Friedmann, Doug Henwood, Andrew Ross.

Several papers were of interest to ROAPE. Including Mariko Frame’s “Neoliberalism and Foreign Investment in African Resources: the highest stage of ecological imperialism?” which builds on the theory of “ecological unequal exchange” and on the concept of ecological imperialism as a system which incorporates power relations and the policies and ideologies – at the global level.

There was a plenary discussion of whether to organise a world ecology network as a more structured reality, on which there was general enthusiasm; a mailing list will be started and there is a plan to repeat this conference in the UK in 2016. One overall preoccupation of the conference was how to engage social movements and natural scientists together on the issue of climate change, while engaging critically with catastrophist discourses.

The format of the conference was effective. Over three days, we had two short, down-to-earth and thematic plenaries every day. Running twice (from 9:00am to 10:15am in the morning and from 4:00pm to 5:15pm in the afternoon) these were well attended as the topics were interesting and relevant and helped attendants to get together and discuss large themes with a collective spirit. The thematic keynote lectures – two for every plenary – were held by senior academics, journalists and activists and aimed at helping people think through potential developments for world ecology studies in the future. The format contributed to encourage collective discussion rather than narrow debate on one’s area of specialism and it worked well as this community of scholars is clearly doing innovative theoretical work.

Dr Elisa Greco is currently associated to the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value, where she works with Professor Phil Woodhouse on the research sub-sector on land and water in Africa. She is a member of the working group of the Review of African Political Economy.

Radical Agendas #1: South Africa

ROAPE

November 29, 2015

By John Saul

The set of essays initially entitled “South Africa: What Next?” that is accessible here over a number of weeks consists of five essays that, together with my introduction posted below, focus on various areas of political creativity currently being acted upon by various peoples, groups and fledgling movements in South Africa. It is complementary to an earlier set of essays on the wider southern Africa region entitled “Southern Africa – the liberation struggle continues” the title of which is self-explanatory and that included case-studies, by various writers, of Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa itself. This was a series first edited for the AfricaFiles “At Issue Ezine”, and then had been reproduced in ROAPE in March, 2011 as vol. 38, #127.

As was true of this former series, the present brace of articles also began life as a monthly “At Issue Ezine” for AfricaFiles, a website of Africa-related e-materials maintained, until very recently, by the AfricaFiles collective (of which I was, for some years, a member) and sited in Toronto. I am grateful to AfricaFiles’ for its permission to now make these materials available for an even wider circulation through the new on-line iteration of ROAPE, an initiative that I and my fellow authors are proud to be a part of. As I have said in my introduction to another recent ROAPE e-feature (my extended interview by David MacDonald to appear here in a few weeks) , “I have, with one brief hiccough, been an editor of one sort or another of ROAPE since the very beginning. I also think ROAPE has stuck pretty successfully to its mission as a radical voice in African Studies and I’m proud to have been a part of it over all these years, including as an active participant in this new venture that seeks to keep ROAPE even more on top of events and ever-present in the fight for humane and equitable outcomes both on the continent and more widely.”

As for the present series of articles itself: after my further introduction to the theme (#1 – below), the following four essays elucidate, consecutively, the novel roles that various organizations, in both urban and rural, are seeking to play in order to lend new, more effective, voice to the concerns of South African civil society (#2), to help focus the reawakening demands linked to issues of feminist concern (#3) and of working-class assertion (#4), and to represent the range of effective environmentally-cognizant assertions that are increasingly visible (#5); this series then concludes with an overview of the whole broad range of resistances and pressure for redress (including the recent dramatic actions by the country’s students) that now mark out South Africa as an ever-more contested political landscape (#6). It is true that the ANC is still an active political presence in South Africa and that the work of building a viable, coherent, and effectively counter-hegemonic alternative to both the ANC’s faltering (but still very real) hold on power and to the complacent enactment of global capital’s on-going recolonization of the country is still very much a “work in progress.” But, as the essays included in this series attest, the signs of a “next liberation struggle” in South Africa are increasingly visible, while also speaking promisingly of the possibility of a brighter future for the vast mass of South Africa’s still-poor and still-disempowered. In that country, then, the struggle really does continue.

A Next Liberation Struggle in South Africa? The Prospects

A “next liberation struggle” in South Africa? To evoke such a prospect and such a goal is to imply that the liberation struggle that culminated in 1994 and saw the emergence of a formally democratic South Africa and a population apparently liberated from oppression and, prospectively, from penury, has not been, in its essentials, so very liberatory after all.

Realities

For it is difficult to so interpret what “liberation” has actually produced – or to see such a result as having been accidental. After all – and as examined at length elsewhere (Saul and Bond, 2014) – the chosen path of the new elite (clustered, in particular, around the ANC and the SACP) has been one of extensive collaboration both with global capital and with local, chiefly white, capitalist elites. This, no doubt, helped ease the transition past the rocks of structured white racism and right-wing backlash, but it represented a substantial compromise with the existing structures of racial capitalism.

Although not every author in this symposium agrees with each of his/her fellow authors on every detail of such an analysis, all do ask a similar and entirely pertinent question: just where is the energy for action to modify, or even to radically change, what can only be seen as an anti-climactic outcome – by means of some kind of renewed liberation struggle in South Africa – to come from? True, perhaps, such a revived struggle for a more genuine liberation may be difficult to imagine. Yet it is well to remind ourselves of how very close South Africa came “last time” (during the struggle that did overthrow apartheid itself) to building a social movement that would transform South Africa even more profoundly.

After all, it was not primarily any “liberation movement” (the ANC, for example) that brought down apartheid. Rather it was in significant measure a popular movement that produced “from below” the initial stirrings of revolt in the Durban strikes of the early seventies and the Soweto resistance of the mid-seventies.

And this, in turn, continued to fire a rebellious populace, acting through COSATU, the UDF and a wide variety of organizations on the ground that ultimately convinced capitalists and canny old-guard politicians a settlement was necessary – one best achieved by abandoning apartheid the better to rescue South Africa’s future for capitalism!

A key player in this compromise was the African National Congress, of course (Saul and Bond, 2014). For it was the ANC, a would-be vanguard liberation movement, that, in the early 1990s, coopted COSATU into its ruling coalition and worked assertively to wind-down the UDF and the active popular movement for change that had emerged during the apartheid years. And it did so while sealing a deal with capital that produced the total adherence of the “new South Africa” to capital’s global logic. What, in fact, had happened was a recolonization of South Africa by global capital – and the complete absorption of the ANC brass into the circle of post-apartheid power and privilege (Lissani et al, 2012).

The result? It was only very slowly that the illusion of meaningful victory showed just how thin and threadbare it was. Of course, a struggle-weary populace can perhaps be forgiven for seeing a considerable victory to lie in the overthrow of so humiliating and degrading a socio-political system as apartheid. Nonetheless, it was not long before this populace began to register the sharp contrast that had come to exist between the smug comfort of capital and its African/ANC front-men in positions of formal power on the one hand, and the broader populace’s own continuing poverty and subordination on the other.

In sum, there were very tangible signs that things weren’t quite working out as the ANC had promised they would and that the socio-economic and political morass into which global and local capital and their firm ally, the ANC brass, had led the the South African liberation struggle had become painfully raw…and increasingly unacceptable (see Neville Alexander, 2002; Dawson and Sinwell, 2012).

Resistances

To be sure, the South African population had been relatively passive in allowing such a recolonization to occur during the false dawn of hope offered by the “transition” that the “defeat” of apartheid permitted. Yet it is also true that the ANC’s shell-game of “achieved liberation,” at first so convincing, did not, as time went on, work quite so well in silencing the revived protests of the country’s poor and (still) oppressed. Recall the old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” In this kind of context, it is not surprising that resistance in South Africa to ANC hegemony began to grow.

Perhaps most dramatic in this regard have been two graphic expressions of such distemper. One was the Marikana Massacre of 2012, at which state forces blatantly shot and killed 35-40 striking miners at Lonmin’s platinum mine. This was said by some to be as stark a wake-up call to the true meaning of the ANC’s post-apartheid rule as had been the Sharpeville Massacre (in 1960) and the Soweto Uprising (in 1976) – these twin events having themselves been so revelatory of the true meaning of apartheid itself in their time.

Second has been the marked eruption, over a number of years, of what Peter Alexander once referred to as “the rebellion of the poor,” referring to the dramatic protests – South Africa would soon become the leader on the world’s table of countries marked by such protests – by the dwellers, both rural and urban, in those very slums whose continuing existence has come to underscore the vast and deepening disparities alluded to above (Peter Alexander, 2014).

Indeed, it is in this latter wave of “community resistance from below” (as Dale McKinley [McKinley, 1997] titles our second essay here) that one sees South Africa’s vast precariat in action, with McKinley’s account charting the emergence, character and political role of community organisations/social movements and their struggle against established power during the years of South Africa’s ostensible democratic transition (see also Saul, 2014a).

In addition, and while registering (as had Alexander) a quantitative intensification of such community-initiated protests, McKinley considers the ongoing and future potential of the mounting of such a radical new politics by the precariat, asking whether this kind of resistance from below can and will continue to grow and also interact effectively with whatever emerging and novel struggles South Africa’s labour movement might also produce (as discussed by Eddie Webster in essay # 4, below). A very new South African history is in the making, if so. It is no wonder, as well, that one presumptive counter-hegemonic alternative to the ANC’s own project, the Democratic Left Front/DLF, consistently speaks of its potential radical base as lying, quite specifically, in “the working class and the poor”! Both precariat and proletariat, in sum: is this not the key?

Another potential source of dramatic protest to be emphasized is explored in the third essay of this collection, that by Shireen Hassim on the possible (and necessary) rebirth of the women’s movement. Of course, as chronicled most effectively by Hassim herself the women’s movement constituted an extremely important force in radicalizing the whole process of removing the apartheid system and also in constructing a new state apparently much more sensitive to gender concerns (Hassim, 2006).

Indeed, women seemed to be among the chief winners in the coming of a new South African democracy; a struggle seemed joined, some thought, to overcome gender inequalities in economic position and social status. Thus, over the past twenty years the number of women in parliament has actually reached parity, quotas for women have been implemented in all government policies. In addition, poor women have become the major beneficiaries of social grants and women’s participation in formal politics has been virtually “normalised.” And yet, Hassim now argues this “victory” actually merits a close second look; it is apparent, she says, that it is only a very thin form of democracy that has been implemented. One in which mere representation has replaced the original and powerful feminist demands for a more real and genuine participation.

Looking beneath the gloss of the “good story” conventionally told in this regard Hassim considers the nature and extent of persisting gender inequalities in economic position, in political efficacy and in social status. Even more crucially, she asks how important women’s initiatives, women’s organizations and women’s issues may yet be to any future building of a new political movement for a new South Africa.

But what of “the working class” per se, once so crucial a component of the overall resistance movement against apartheid but now fragmented, notably by splits between more established and organized workers on the one hand, and the vast array of “casuals,” “part-time”, “semi-employed,” and unorganized workers that have come to define so much of South Africa on the other? Here, in the fourth essay in this series, one of South Africa’s most-cited writers on the experiences of the country’s workers, Eddie Webster, again surveys the issue of “working class politics” but now on a quite different terrain than that which was once defined by the struggle for national liberation and by the transition to democracy (cf. Webster, 1985; Adler and Webster, 2000).

Indeed, in the post-apartheid context of the ANC’s apparently unqualified acceptance of the primacy of capital’s power and programme, and in the wake of such a startling event as the Marikana Massacre, Webster focuses quite specifically on the existing challenges that South Africa’s largest trade union, NUMSA, feels it necessary to confront. Drawing on surveys he has undertaken since 1991 Webster carefully analyzes NUMSA’s shifting position on politics: from a qualified support for the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party to growing disillusionment with this Alliance.

Such a trajectory in turn culminated, Webster underscores, in a special congress decision in December 2013 that mandated the NUMSA leadership to forge ahead with the formation of a United Front and Movement for Socialism in order to advance working class struggles and to reach out to a broader constituency. Webster then examines the implications of the different options now facing NUMSA and the possible directions that a novel working class politics might ultimately take in South Africa.

Clearly, as Jacklyn Cock argues (in our fifth essay here, as elsewhere [Cock, 2007]), prospects for a “new liberation struggle” in South Africa depend in part on a convincing vision of an alternative social order. And under present South African conditions, she suggests, the transformative vision of a just transition to a sustainable low carbon economy can provide the embryo of a new (and necessary) eco-socialist order. Moreover, this in turn would have to involve the collective, democratic control of production for social needs, rather than profit; the mass roll out of socially owned renewable energy that could mean decentralized energy with much greater potential for community control; the localisation of food production in the shift from carbon-intensive industrial agriculture to food sovereignty; and the sharing of resources in more collective social forms.

Nor, emphasizes Cock, are these unrealistic goals. After all, the anti-capitalist nature of such an alternative is related to the growing recognition that the fundamental cause of South Africa’s deepening environmental crisis – one that is having devastating impacts on the working class and the precariat alike – is the expansionist logic of capitalism. And, as she carefully recounts, this recognition is promoting, in turn, new forms of organisation and new alliances between labour, community and environmental activists – a solidarity that embodies the promise of a new kind of socialism that is at once ethical, ecological and democratic.

A counter-hegemony?

Precariat, proletariat, women and environmental activists: can all these and more potential centres of organization, of protest, and of progressive demand now begin to add up to something quite new and potentially counter-hegemonic to what is being proffered by the ANC state and by recycled and reconstituted racial capitalism. Vishwas Satgar, author (Williams and Satgar, 2013) and Democratic Left Front activist in South Africa, explores, in a sixth essay, the situation as traced above – with South Africa now standing, in his phrase, somewhere between “crisis and renewal.” Moreover, this is in fact, he argues, a situation that could now permit a freshly mobilized mass constituency to find a promising, effective and sustainable political form.

Consider this, Satgar says. The resistance to neoliberalisation has already engendered numerous promising left-responses in South Africa: an impressive trade union-led street politics, the sustained building of social movements and multiple community-based protests. There has also been much lobbying by local NGOs and popular organizations as well as a new and militant expression of independent trade unionism – with anti-neoliberal resistance outside of the ANC-led Alliance coming to the fore in the first decade of the new millennium of the 2000s, deepened by the Marikana Massacre, the “NUMSA moment” and the further unravelling of the ANC’s national liberation project itself.

Satgar’s article then further maps the terrain of left politics in post-apartheid South Africa in order to clarify orientations, trajectories and limits. Anchoring this survey is a particular focus on the Democratic Left Front/DLF) to which initiative he is himself very close – with various contenders for a similar role ranging from Julius Malema’s rather populist and demagogic Economic Freedom Fighters to the new United Front South Africa – he identifies space for progressive social forces and those on the left to find convergence around a platform of alternative grass roots solidarity and a new anti-capitalist imaginary. His article thus provides a critical analysis of left politics in general and a specific assessment of one attempt at left renewal as forged within the Democratic Left Front, while evaluating more generally the challenges and prospects for any emergent and potentially counter-hegemonic left alternative in post-apartheid South Africa.

* * *

South Africa, for all its size and economic weight, may actually have gained a somewhat exaggerated reputation in the eyes of the rest of its continent and of the world: the positive role of the ANC, even in the liberation of South Africa, overstated and the benign role of Mandela, especially after apartheid, rather misconstrued (Saul, 2014b). For people in the region another face was soon apparent, however: South Africa as an entrepot for the sub-imperial penetration of the sub-continent by corporations that used SA as a spring-board for depredations further north (Saunders, 2008). And also as an often unwelcoming snake-pit of violence and xenophobia directed against in-coming migrant-workers from the region and beyond (Mozambicans as target providing a good case in point) – such enormities owing much to the ANC’s “lack of visionary leadership,” in Ozias Tungwarara’s potent phrase (Tungwarara, 2015, Essa, 2015).

In short, a “liberated” but untransformed South Africa has done little to help to free the continent as a whole; moreover, if the situation decays further it may actually do a great deal of damage (as Mugabe has already done in Zimbabwe, for example). Small wonder that Africa as a whole has sensed that it has a significant stake in what the forces we itemize in this set of essays can do to reclaim South Africa for a more progressive outcome. For such an outcome in South Africa, then, the struggle continues.

John S. Saul has been a liberation support/anti apartheid activist since the 1960s, most prominently with the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portugal’s African Colonies/Southern Africa (TCLPAC/TCLSAC). He has also taught at York University, the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), the University of Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique) and the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa). He is the author/editor of more than twenty books on southern Africa and development issues.

References

Adler, Glenn and Eddie Webster, eds. (2000), Trade Unions and Democratization in South Africa (London and New York: MacMillan Press abd st. Martin’s Press).

Alexander, Neville (2002), An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa(Pietermaritzburg, S. A.: University of Natal Press.

Alexander, Peter et. al. (2014), Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer (Auckland Park, S. A.: Jacana, 2012).

Cock, Jackyn (2007), The War Against Ourselves: Nature, Power and Justice (Johannesburg: Wits University Press).

Dawson, Marcelle C. and Luc Sinwell, eds. (2012), Contesting Transformation: Popular Resistance in Twenty-First-Century South Africa (London: Pluto Press).

Essa, Azad (2015), “Is South Africa taking xenophopia seriously,” Aljazeera, April 30, 2015).

Hassim, Shireen (2006), Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).

Lissani, Arianna and Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien and Omar Badsha, eds. (2012), One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today (Johannesburg: Wits University Press).

McKinley, Dale (1997), The ANC and the Liberation Struggle” A Critical Political Biography (London: Pluto Press).

Miller, Darlene, O. Olayede, and R. Saunders, eds. (2008), “Special Issue: South Africa in Africa – African perceptions, African realities,” African Sociological Review, 12, 1.

Saul, John S. and Patrick Bond (2014), South Africa – The Present as History: From Mrs. Ples to Mandela and Marikana (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Johannesburg: James Currey and Jacana).

Saul, John S. (2014), A Flawed Freedom: Rethinking Southern African Liberation (London, Toronto and Cape Town, S. A.: Pluto, Between the Lines, UCT/Juta).

Saul, John S.(2014a), “The New Terms of Resistance: Proletriat, Precariat and the Present African Prospect,” in Saul, 2014.

Saul, John S. (2014b), “Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s Flawed Freedom,” in Saul, 2014.

Saunders, Richard (2008), At Issue EZINE, Vol 8: South Africa in Africa (AfricaFiles web-site); see also Miller, Darlene et. al., eds. (2008).

Tungwarara, Ozias (2015), “Xenophobia in South Africa: lack of visionary leadership,” at Open Society in Southern Africa (http://www.osisa.org/), April 15, 2015.

Williams, Michelle and Vishwas Satgar, eds. (2014), Marxism in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique & Struggle (Johannesburg” Wits University Press).

Webster, Edward (1985), Cast in a Racial Mould: labour process and trade unionism in the foundries (Johannesburg: Ravan Press).

The Imperative of Radical Political Economy for Africa

ROAPE

November 29, 2015

By Femi Aborisade

It cannot be said often enough, that overall progress remains too slow and too uneven; that too many Africans remain caught in downward spirals of poverty, insecurity and marginalisation; that too few people benefit from the continent’s growth trend and rising geo-strategic importance; that too much of Africa’s enormous resource wealth remains in the hands of narrow elites and, increasingly, foreign investors, without being turned into tangible benefits for its people

– Kofi Annan, 2012

The lamentation above by Kofi Annan appears to succinctly sum up the state of the downtrodden segments of the African people at the present time. More than two thirds of Africans exist on less than $2 a day. However, there are other Africans who are among the richest people in the world. Aliko Dangote of Nigeria is richer than everyone in Britain. Nicky Oppenheimer and Johann Rupert of South Africa are richer than all but two people in Britain.

The question to pose therefore is what is the root cause of the pervasive poverty across Africa? We have a duty to continue to explain that there is a relationship between poverty and politics. Politics creates poverty and poverty is a product of politics. The poor are poor because the rich are rich and the rich are rich because the poor are poor. The process of the enrichment of the rich is, simultaneously, the same process by which the poor are dispossessed by the nature of the economic system and economic decisions, which are taken by the few who wield political power.

To the ruling classes in Africa and their imperialist backers, the root cause of poverty in much of Africa is corruption and lack of ‘good governance.’ Thus, in 1989, the World Bank, declared, ‘underlying the litany of Africa’s development problems is a crisis of governance.’ Nearly a decade later, in the overview of its World Development Report, the World Bank also boldly stated, that, ‘Corruption became endemic. Development faltered, and poverty endured.’ The governance agenda was thus born and corruption was seen as the root cause of the problems of the Global South and, particularly, an inherent problem of the public sector, as, ‘The state’s monopoly on coercion, which gives it the power to intervene effectively in economic activity, also gives it the power to intervene arbitrarily. This power, coupled with access to information not available to the general public, creates opportunities for public officials to promote their own interests at the expense of the general interest.’

The idea that corruption is at the root of Africa’s underdevelopment has also been broadly accepted by leading African economists, as Isaksen asserted, ‘the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) has articulated the importance of accountability, describing corruption, ineffective policies, and waste of resources as major causes of the continent’s stagnation.’

This view continues, as a recent paper on corruption claims that, ‘Hunger, child mortality, illiteracy, and poverty cannot be eradicated as long as corruption continues to sap resources from the world’s poorest countries.’

To the advocates of corruption being the sole independent variable troubling Africa, slavery, colonial history, imperialist conquests and the neo-liberal hegemonic agenda should be forgotten as having any role to play in how Africa has been underdeveloped, exploited, raped and bled.

But the effects of slavery and colonialism in the economic ruin of Africa ought to be adequately understood. Gareth Austin points out that at the beginning of the twentieth century, having been ravaged by the slave trade for several centuries, sub-Saharan Africa was reduced to, ‘an overwhelmingly land-abundant region characterised by shortages of labour and capital, by perhaps surprisingly extensive indigenous market activities and by varying but often low levels of political centralization.’

Then, about 60 years of colonialism resulted in what John Saul and Colin Leys describe as, ‘a continent of household-based agrarian economies with very limited long-distance trade, colonialism imposed cash-crop production for export, and mineral extraction, with manufacturing supposed to come later.’

Sub-Saharan Africa’s economy is more susceptible to the vagaries of world price changes and other external shocks than more diversified economies, because primary production still dominates its exports. Femi Aborisade has explained that the dominant economic discourse of the last three decades has been neo-liberalism. According to its advocates, the state is a drain on the value produced by the private sector and so should be scaled back by privatisation, de-regulation and outsourcing. Governments across the Global South, including sub-Saharan Africa have been pressurised to follow this approach. Privatisation usually provides state assets to the private sector at a discount. Indeed, many state assets tend to be acquired at little or no cost.

Outsourcing and contracting out provide increased opportunities for corruption. According to Transparency International, 20-25 percent of budgets may be lost through corrupt contracting. These estimates are confirmed by the former Vice President of the World Bank for Africa and former Federal Minister of Education in Nigeria, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, who claimed in August 2012 that, ‘in fact results reveal that as much as 20 percent of the entire capital expenditure will end up in private pockets annually.’

The link between neo-liberal policies and corruption is confirmed by Kühn and Sherman. In the case of Nigeria, they argue in the context of structural adjustment in the mid-1980s that,’corruption as a way of life has become pervasive and popularized in the Nigerian polity, especially in the context of President Ibrahim Babangida’s structural adjustment programme (SAP), where the working people’s real incomes has become so devalued that it is impossible for most salary and wage earners and those on marginal and inelastic incomes to survive on their legitimate earnings. The obsession of many elite members with primitive private accumulation at the expense of the public means that they tend to divert resources earmarked for running and maintaining public institutions in their charge – institutions like hospitals, schools, universities, public utilities, the judiciary, the police and even the armed forces – to corrupt private purposes.’

What the foregoing suggests is that there is a need for the poor and their organizations in Africa to develop alternative explanations to the poverty in Africa and not simplistically accept ruling class explanations and solutions to Africa’s problems.

A Radical Programme for Nigeria

For example, in fighting corruption in Nigeria, the working people and their organizations ought to develop an independent definition of corruption and determine what constitutes corrupt acts and how to fight them, without simply tailing the ruling class agenda. In this context, organized and unorganized segments of the labour movement could unite on the basis of the following demands for practical struggles to collectively change society in the interest of the marginalized and excluded poor:

Demand regular payment of wages, salaries and pensions, as and when due.
Reduce pay differentials such that no-one in the public sector earns more than 12 times the national minimum wage. (Through income inequality, the top politicians, in and out of public offices are able to corrupt the pauperized masses, compromise law enforcement agencies, the judiciary and continue to nurture corruption and perpetuate themselves or their political sons and daughters in power).
Mobilise for increase in the National Minimum Wage.
Support wage indexation so that wages and salaries rise as inflation rises.

National minimum income security for older persons who can no longer work or who cannot get jobs even if they are able and willing to work.

National minimum income security for persons of active work age who are unable to earn sufficient income in cases of:
- Sickness (in which case the individual should be entitled to statutory sick benefits)
- Unemployment (in which case the individual should be entitled to statutory unemployment allowance).
- Maternity (in which case the individual should be entitled to statutory maternity benefits).
- Disability (in which case the individual should be entitled to statutory disability allowance).
Re-nationalise privatized public enterprises. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, as amended, provides that the economic system shall not be operated in such a manner as to permit the concentration of wealth or the means of production and exchange in the hands of few individuals or of a group.
Oppose Public-Private Partnerships through which public resources are used to empower the private sector while undermining the capacity of the public sector. Rather, support Public-Public Partnerships.
Oppose Contractocracy – a system of governance through award of contracts to execute public projects. Transparency International (PI) has established that 20-25 percent of public budgets are consumed in corrupt contract awards and outsourcing.
Oppose outsourcing in the public sector. The building of primary schools and roads, for example, should be done in-house (or through direct labour) as in the past with the Public Works Departments. Similarly, security of government buildings should be conducted by public servants and not private companies.
Oppose the operation of the unconstitutional Office of the First Lady/Wife of the President/Governor through which public funds are frittered away unconstitutionally at national, state and local government levels, as well as at the level of the legislature.
Mandatory public declaration of assets by top public officers (such as Ministers, Commissioners, Advisers, Governing Board members, Directors, and their aides) before assumption of public office.
Implement progressive taxation – tax the rich to fund public projects for the interest of the poor.

In the final analysis, workers and the poor should aim at organizing to change society in their interests based on a radical political economic framework, but these measures would be the start of a process that would widen the space for a consistent pro-poor political and economic strategy.

Femi Aborisade is a socialist, writer and lawyer from Nigeria.

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