Revolution and Counterrevolution in Burkina Faso

November 25, 2015

By Baba Aye

The October 31, 2014 uprising in Burkina Faso heralded a year of intense struggle between contending forces that seek to bring to birth a new country and those intent on maintaining the status quo in one form or the other. The attempted coup of September 17, 2015 marked a watershed in this confrontation between revolutionary pressures and reaction.

The triumph of the revolutionary moment last year was however not just a Burkinabé moment. It represented the contradictory currents of struggle on the continent. These as a whole cannot be separated from the global era of crises and revolts, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. There are lessons to draw from the “great variety of morbid symptoms” that have appeared in the interregnum in Burkina Faso as well as the inspiring fight back that have halted the manifestation of the worst of these symptoms.

This blog summarily puts in perspective developments in Burkina Faso between the October 31, 2014 and September 17, 2015 and discusses challenges and possibilities for the unfolding moment and lessons for the working class and the broader social movements for change across Africa.

Towards an uprising

Blaise Compaoré’s attempt to run for a fifth term as President ignited what was already a tinder box of mass anger and resistance that had broiled for half a decade. The Citizen’s Broom (Balai Citoyen), a youth organisation involved in last year’s protests, conveyed this spirit that had shaken the workplace and several communities in the country who have all taken to the streets in the upheavals.

Backed by France, Compaoré overthrew Thomas Sankara in 1987, in the twilight of the Cold War era. He immediately went about rolling back the popular structures of the radical interventionist state which Sankara had utilised to carry about the most pro-poor people reformist agenda in modern Africa. He was also quick to transit into a civilian garb four years later, establishing a semi-presidential system while building the Regiment of Presidential Security (RSP) as the an autonomous elite arrowhead of repression, to maintain his hold on power.

At the same time, he commenced a Structural Adjustment Programme, which helped consolidate the material base of the weak indigenous property owners, at the behest of International Financial Institutions. The apparent successes of the SAP was hailed by Western imperialism as GDP growth rates increased from -0.603% in 1990 to 5.76% by 1995 and averaging a 10% growth in the 1990s.

More importantly, behind these seemingly impressive figures lurked rising inequality and sharpening discontent. By 1998 the first wave of mass protests commenced, sparked by the RSP’s murder of Norbert Zongo, a journalist investigating the murder of a chauffeur of Blaise Compaoré’s brother, in the presidential palace. This protest movement was contained.

By 2011, the dress rehearsal of what would be the 2014 revolution played itself out. A massive wave of strikes in the mining sector engulfed the country, poor farmers joined the fray, demonstrating against poor prices for their produce and mutinies rocked the army including within the ranks of the elite RSP over unpaid wages.

Compaoré fled to his hometown, Zinaire, during the thick of those moments in February 2011. Opposition parties tried to give leadership to this mass movement that had arisen independent of them. The regime caved in to most demands of workers at the peak of the movement in May. But as soon as it could, it beat back the tide with repressive tactics (for the fullest account of these events see Lila Chouli’s book available online).

In the wake of the 2011 revolts, a network of youths who had been active in the street struggles across several cities and towns constituted a Mouvement des Sans Voix (‘The Voiceless’). They were to a certain extent influenced by the los indignados movement at the time in Spain. The Le Balai Citoyen which was formed on August 25, 2013 as a grassroots movement, brought together members of Mouvement des Sans Voix and other youths, for popular struggle. It gave leadership on the streets to the mass uprising that toppled the Compaoré regime last year.

Progress, contestation and reaction

Most political revolutions end up defeated or with power transferred to a section of the same regime. This, more often than not, is due to ideological, political and organisational weaknesses of the popular sector’s leadership while some sections of the regime distance themselves from the sinking ship. But, the mole of the revolution continues to burrow below the state and its appurtenances. Similarly, the ousted elite hardly rest, planning to strike back. These broad strokes of the general nature of the contestation between progress and reaction at conjunctural moments unfolded in Burkina Faso over the last year.

Both Compaoré and General Honoré Traoré, whom Compaoré picked as his successor, were swept into the dustbin of history within a day in October 2014. While La Balai Citoyen rallied the popular struggle against Compaoré’s inordinate ambition, yet it neither aimed for, nor was organised to win power. The army, fractured as it was, became the organised force that stepped in to rescue the state from the ferment of society, with Colonel Isaac Zida of the RSP. Like the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in Egypt when it forced its fallen angel, Hosni Mubarak to step aside, Zida at that heady moment issued pseudo-revolutionary slogans that passed the army off as being part of the people in revolt.

Confident of heading off the tide of insurrection, he immediately suspended the constitution. This only deepened the rebellion, which curtailed his powers. Within two weeks, Michel Kafando, a diplomat and former top official of the regime, was appointed as interim president by the popular movement – encompassing civil society organisations, trade unions, opposition political parties and religious leaders. The constitution was reinstated, with presidential elections fixed for October 11, 2015. Considering the balance of power, Zida was retained as prime minister and minister of defence.

The victory of last year’s uprising has emboldened the working people and youth. Burkina Faso witnessed an avalanche of strikes and demonstrations. Every sector of the economy and society, including agriculture in the rural areas has been rocked by mass action with demands that are both economic and political. In December last year, the Avocet Ignat gold mine was occupied by workers who shut out the bosses. Workers and other members of the community also shut down the Tambao manganese mines owned by a subsidiary of the London-based Timis Mining Corporation. They accused the transnational corporation of illegally acquiring its mining license. The government was forced to halt production there in March, and institute an investigation into how its license was secured.

Earlier in January, workers in Brakina Sodibo, the country’s largest brewery, downed tools for 48 hours. Their demands included salary increases, improved working conditions and the reinstatement of workers wrongfully sacked in 1994 and 2004. They followed up the strike with weeks of demonstrations and won a resounding victory. UCRB, the transport workers’ union, also organised a 48-hour national strike in March. Their demands included the implementation of the 2011 collective agreement which was never fully implemented, the reduction of driver’s license charges and ending the harassment of workers by the police. All their demands were acceded to.

In April, the streets of Ouagadougou erupted with the march of over 50,000 persons against corruption, which forced primary, secondary and tertiary schools to be shutdown. The demonstration on April 8 was convened by a national coalition against corruption which included trade unions, students’ unions and civic organisations. Twenty two days later, residents of Sabce just 90 kilometres from the capital Ouagadougou blockaded the city, forcing the Mayor to abdicate. On May Day a sea of protesters marched through Ouagadougou calling on the interim government to take drastic measures to curtail the increasing cost of living.

Within the context of this massive social movement from below, a frenetic movement from above aimed at curtailing the deepening of revolutionary pressures arose. Central to this strategy within the circles of the elite now in charge of the state was ensuring a foreclosure of the regime represented by Compaoré. This entailed purging the government initially scheduled to emerge in October of persons from the Compaoré-headed regime.

In April, the interim government thus amended the electoral law, barring all those who had supported Compaoré’s third term bid from contesting. Based on this move the Constitutional Court cleared 16 presidential aspirants to run and declared 52 (which included the leader of Compaoré’s Congress for Democracy and Progress) as being ineligible for the elections. The transitional government also took up the gauntlet of the challenge from below to fight corruption. This, hardly surprisingly, appeared to have pro-Compaoré politicians as the main targets. Two of such (Jean Bertin Ouédraogo, a former infrastructure minister and Jérôme Bougouma, a former security minister) were jailed in August on charges of graft.

The transitional government itself was fraught with tension, which reflected deeper struggles within the ruling class, in its efforts at pacifying the restless mass. Then Kafando stripped Zida of his office as Minister of Defence (and also took over the ministry of security portfolio from Auguste Denise Barry, an ally of Zida), in July. And on September 14, the National Reconciliation and Reforms Commission recommended the disbanding of the 1,300 soldiers-strong RSP, describing it as “an army within the army.” Two days later, the RSP detained both Kafando and Zida, launching its ill-fated coup d’état.

Problems and prospects in the unfolding moment: striking a blow

The regular army acted against the RSP and the Africa Union/ECOWAS played up the carrot and stick to the coupists. But, the decisive force in bringing the putsch to kneel, was the mass upheaval against it on the streets and in the workplaces. The defeat of counter-revolution was at the hands of the revolutionary movement from below.

RSP troops initially took over the streets of the capital, making it difficult for large numbers to gather, as in 2014. But the trade unions immediately called a nationwide general strike. In other cities and towns like Bobo Dioulasso, Fada N’Gourma, Banfora, Dori, Ouahigouya and Koudougou protesters, which included striking workers and activists from the different grassroots organisations, took over the streets. This mass power did not only foil the coup, it rejected the deal brokered by the AU/ECOWAS team between the transitional council and the coupists which would have given amnesty to the later. The general strike and mass protests continued for ten days, until total victory in smashing the attempted putsch.

The extent to which the social movement from below coalesces itself into an organisation for power that embodies systemic change is thus a central element of the prospects for revolution. The heterogeneous character of this movement is however both a strength and a weakness.

We have to be clear that the popular forces within it draw ideological inspiration from years of confrontation with the state before 1982 and particularly so from the experience of the Sankara-era. Unfortunately though, partisan formations of the left are splintered along a dozen lines of weak parties that have not seen much growth despite the glorious past they claim and the rising tide of mass protests, insurrections and revolt of recent years. A possible silver lining in this dark cloud of disunity is the formation of a united front by ten of these parties, in the wake of the October revolution last year.

However the major opposition parties, which were set to contest the elections in late November 2015, are mainly outgrowths of the Compaoré regime. The Mouvement pour le Peuple et le Progrès which is now one of the two major parties was formed in January 2014 by 75 leading CDP members. Their grouse was simply against Compaoré’s intent then to run for a third term. Its presidential candidate Marc Christian Kaboré, a banker, served at different times as Prime Minister (1994-1996) and President of the National Assembly (2000-2012).

Most of the other leading parties equally share the ideology of the Compaoré-era regime. The UCP, the other party with apparent electoral clout, is headed by Zephirin Diabré, a former boss of the French nuclear firm AREVA, who gave implicit support to the September coup. In defense of his ideological stance generally, he once retorted that: “I’m not afraid or ashamed to say I’m a neoliberal. We will need to go outside to get aid.”[1]

Bénéwendé Sankara’s UNIR-PS (Union for Rebirth -Sankarist Party) is arguably the third in the pecking line of possibilities electorally. But during the fightback against the coup, he was a leading voice in the call for “active resistance.”[2] The challenge of translating popular support for Sankarism and the leading roles of Sankarists on the barricades into votes will most likely be hamstrung by resources and the limitations of structures of Sankarist parties largely limited to the urban areas.

As important as the elections are, there remains questions of thoroughgoing transformation. Irrespective of the party that emerges (or possible alliances in the eventuality of hung votes), it is very unlikely that the genie of mass revolt will go back into the bottle. As Smokey said of Balai Citoyen, even before the October uprising, we “will continue to exist. Today, we are working with the opposition parties, tomorrow, we might fight against those same people who will have come to power. We need a true change in power.” The trade unions are also likely to continue to struggle against economic deprivation in the midst of an economic crisis.

Significance for sub-Saharan Africa

It is equally important to situate the significance of the unfolding situation in Burkina Faso for sub-Saharan Africa. What is the significance of this “Black Spring” as part of a broader relatively inchoate challenge of the existing order globally in general and within the region? Building the popular forces in Burkina was partly inspired by similar efforts of the Y’en a marre in Senegal[3]. The successful demonstrations of working people’s power continues to inspire a radicalisation of politics from below around the continent.

This new wave of protest on the continent has come with gales of protests and has also expressed itself through the tinderbox of electoral politics. Unfortunately, the absence of radical partisan organisations with deep roots in the working people has delimited the possible harnessing of the street and the ballot box as was the case in the Latin American pink tide. Building such parties would require a partisan direction with the trade union movement and the (old and) emergent radical civic movements like the Balai Citoyen moving beyond pressure group politics to challenge with mass actions without eschewing the polls.

But the moment we are in presently, which the events in Burkina Faso demonstrate, is one where not only governments are being defeated but working class-people are demanding new regimens of politics. Through revolutionary pressures from below, democratic spaces within which popular forces could further grow. These are of course severe challenges. Where traditions of trade union and civic organisation activism have been stunted by wars for instance as in Burundi, repression is likely to be sharp and for a while at least, not unsuccessful in damming the tide of protests and resistance. There is also the possibility of incorporation, as a tactic of containment by ruling elites.

For now the main beneficiaries of the challenge to the state from the hammer-blows of mass struggles are former allies and key players of the previous state who seek further economic liberalisation. However, this could also be their undoing in the coming period. Lessons learnt in the interregnum might well bring to birth a readiness of the people to not only kick out Compaoré and his likes across the continent, but to make a bid for power based on their own agency and organisations.

Baba Aye is editor of Socialist Worker (Nigeria) and a trade union educator, he is also a Contributing Editor of ROAPE.

Notes

[1] See: Tolé Sagnon, 2013, Zéphirin Diabré : Je n’ai ni peur ni honte de dire que je suis neoliberal, http://www.burkina24.com/2013/07/25/zephirin-diabre-je-nai-ni-peur-ni-honte-de-dire-que-je-suis-neoliberal/

[2] See: Brian Peterson, 2015, “After the coup in Burkina Faso: unity, justice, and dismantling the Compaoré system”, African Arguments, September 25, http://africanarguments.org/2015/09/25/after-the-coup-in-burkina-faso-unity-justice-and-dismantling-the-compaore-system/

[3] Even though it was not successful in stopping Abdoulaye Wade’s constitutional amendment.

The Tragedy of Migration Management and the Role of Concerned Scholars and Activists

ROAPE

November 24, 2015

By Hannah Cross

‘Searching for a better life’ is a phrase that appears repeatedly in the UK press as migration disasters and successes continue to shock and overwhelm in Europe. Its frequency of use among diverse commentators suggests it is sometimes applied as a neutral description, or in other cases to encourage sympathy, but a more calculated usage invokes the opposite and trivialises migrants’ pre-departure predicaments and decisions, whether they are leaving camps, villages or cities [1]. Often voiced by migrants themselves, it seems an innocuous phrase, but as an explanation of the multitude of voluntary migrations it is both meaningless (aren’t many life decisions made for a better life?) and, at the same time, undervalues people and their societies. It is wrapped up in the barely questioned assumption that life here is better than life there, and that migrants are actively seeking to attain a life here as the end-goal.

The reality is far more complex. As part of my earlier PhD research in 2007-9, I interviewed and spent time with migrants in and from West Africa, along with their families, stayers and returnees. Many would attempt, and sometimes had attempted more than once, clandestine and overcrowded voyages of four days or more through a tempestuous stretch of the Atlantic towards the Canary Islands, or had departed for Europe from the Mediterranean coasts of North Africa.

Though ‘searching for a better life’ seems tautological as a motivation to migrate, the predominant logic that I encountered was different: whether disappearing into the sea in secrecy or as a result of family pressure, Europe would be the means, not the end. ‘Searching for a sustainable standard of life, here in Africa’ sounds more accurate. This can only be understood in the context of the rich social fabric that has bounded economically ravaged communities. The income earned from unskilled work in Spain or Italy would overturn household insecurity, covering medical care, education, retirements, or the acquisition of tools and other means of production in a way that could not be achieved locally or elsewhere in Africa, though it might take 15 years of remittances to reach this goal. Sometimes, land, livestock or jewels would be sold to fund a journey, leading to local controversies over the possibility of using the money for local enterprise instead of a risky migration – but it was as common for people to leave home with nothing, and to exchange their skills or friendship for free passage, or find work en route in a Saharan town, earning the money to pay for transport.

Those interviewed were the exactly the kind of migrants who might find themselves on a boat with other West Africans and a much larger number of refugees from Syria, the Horn of Africa, and other countries in turmoil. Boats such as the one that left Tripoli on the morning of 18 April 2015, but which capsized 60 miles from the Libyan coast, when over 700 people are thought to have died. This humanitarian crisis brought the total number of Mediterranean deaths in 2015 to an estimated 1,727 towards the end of April and has now surpassed 2500 [2]. The distress calls continue several times per week [3]. Towns like Tambacounda in Senegal have experienced the loss of people in the Mediterranean sea or in unstable areas of the Sahara desert that they must cross to reach it.

People leaving Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone and other West African countries to go to Europe are often considered ‘economic migrants’, with varying emphases given to seeking wealth or fleeing poverty. What was more consistent in my fieldwork was a sharp decline in living standards, experienced over a generation or as a more recent rupture from the conditions of everyday life. What created these ruptures, whether in Senegalese and Mauritanian fishing communities, in Gambian farms, in Ghanaian mining towns, in Nigerian cities, or in Malian villages and elsewhere, was local economic dispossession, compounded by national political crises and household vulnerabilities. It is not an entire social class that is attempting to leave, but instead a range of people of different backgrounds whose departures are triggered by an inability to meet the needs of the household by other means. One Senegalese resident in Barcelona told me, ‘life is not only about food and drink’ as his funds to his home country over more than a decade continued to be used for schooling, the maintenance costs of his family’s house and other unexpected expenses; while others’ families would face more immediate hunger if they did not send money.

What I found was how externally-driven macroeconomic policies, founded on indebtedness, restricted countries’ economic and political sovereignty and development. As a result, families would be unable to sustain themselves as diverse but limited articulations of globalised neoliberalism took hold within this broader structure of domination. Migrants’ personal histories showed the consequences: factories closed, crops would not sell because local markets were flooded with imported goods, resources were looted, staple food prices increased dramatically, workers were not paid, and the state was often too weak to provide social security or support industrial development, sometimes unable to defend its own territory. Young people, geographically spread, found themselves a drain on household resources, unable to contribute, or parents lost the means to provide for their children.

It is staggering to consider that each surviving boat passenger has reached the most successful of a range of arbitrary outcomes, leaving others behind who have faced failed journeys and years of transit, destitution, imprisonment and death. Humane migration management seems an almost insurmountable cause in this sense, and is inseparable from an unequal world order. Humanity towards stricken people, if not an imperative for its own sake, is not merely a matter of ‘colonial debt’, but of a continuing debt as wealthier countries have continued to benefit disproportionately from raw materials, land and cheap labour in former colonies.

‘Fortress Europe’ is a well-known construct, depicted in concrete form here. The EU’s response to this round of drownings includes a dual strategy of criminalisation and bureaucratised brutality as it jumps towards military action in Libya against traffickers. It is abhorrent and tragic to respond to a refugee crisis, located in a country suffering from the charge to war by the US, UK and France in 2011, with drones, a naval mission based on destruction, and the need to calculate collateral damage! [4]

It is convenient but inaccurate to propagandise the infrastructure of clandestine migration as a criminal network worthy of military action – militarisation is undoubtedly forcing trafficking towards higher levels of organisation and internationalisation, but captains of grossly overcrowded fishing boats are in reality in the same predicament as the passengers. In the late 2000s in Senegal, for example, artisanal fishing was so greatly undermined by large foreign trawlers (facilitated by EU agreements), and the unmanageable cost of fuel and basic household supplies, that it ceased to be profitable, while the labour market more generally was in a state of collapse. When I returned to the Senegalese coast last year, environmental destruction was evident as returned migrants reported the plundering of halieutic resources with no rest periods granted for their renewal. Trafficking became one viable way for fishermen to apply their knowledge of the sea, though the endangerment of so many people would deter the vast majority. Libya, however, is facing the different circumstances of civil war.

The passengers also face more punishment. A successful journey to European shores has typically been followed by immediate repatriation, or 40 days of detention followed by repatriation or entry into the European country. A new system is in process to ‘quarantine’ migrants, and possibly detain them for up to 18 months, in the southern European countries that are handling the bulk of arrivals from Libya. Meanwhile, the political elites in wealthier countries to the north harbour a wave of extraordinary callousness towards immigrants for political gain, creating a crisis of humanitarianism. It is imposed on Italy, Greece and Malta to overcome a system that is not ‘sufficiently fast and effective’, as though bureaucracy could solve this horror [5]. The Malian activist Aminata Traoré wrote of an ‘Afrique humiliée’ [6]. after migrants had been shot at and killed trying to enter Spanish enclaves in Morocco in 2005, humiliated not only by people’s encounters with the migration regime, but by the indignities of the capitalist structure of power which created the desperation to enter its epicentres.

Migration as a research field

The widespread assumption that life is better for migrants in Europe than in Africa does not appear in spite of academic research, but is heavily influenced by it. It is underpinned by the assumption in neoclassical economics that decisions are individualistic and motivated by wealth, creating ‘rational’ choices. The most well-known migration model is the push-pull framework, which considers how people are pushed away by certain adverse socio-economic conditions, and pulled towards better ones. This certainly describes a flow of migration, but it becomes problematic when applied to individuals. It is dehumanising because it only applies to abstract others, while if we turn such a lens on ourselves, we see that life is more complicated. Decisions on where we live, who we live with, where we work, and what we consider a ‘better life’, are not (for most people!) driven by the maximum enrichment we can attain as individuals, but instead are bounded in social and cultural histories and chance, while financial survival, however that is understood, plays a major role. In reducing migrants to ‘economic agents’, rather than locating them in the economic situations they find themselves in, we are contributing to their humiliation and more precisely, to the simplistic and vain idea that all the world would spend their lives in Europe if they could, and must thereby be treated with suspicion and hostility. Further illustrating the need to challenge the influence of economics on migration discourse and policy, a knighted Oxford-based development economist was recently found to be wrongly inflaming myths in the popular press, including the Daily Mail, about the composition and number of immigrants in the UK [7].

Outside the more economistic approaches to migration are engaged and empirically rich forms of research which still, sadly, have little to say in the political arena. Migration research has a tendency to mark its progress with new descriptive terms and fashionable re-conceptualisations, obscuring the more serious political questions that are considered in other areas of political economy. Structure-agency debates are rehashed at conferences and show that migration studies are often averse to considering the broader historical processes that lead to migration, constrain it and result from it – the collapse of earlier labour regimes, economic dispossession, border control and the construction of illegality, the ways that wealthy receiving countries benefit from a continuous supply of cheap labour in a world financial system that persistently pushes production costs down, often with underdevelopment in sending countries as the outcome and inequality intensified. Debate and analysis of these processes of political economy does not ignore agency or detract from the complexity of individual migrations, but instead presents an explanation that migrants themselves are often acutely aware of.

Focusing on the characteristics of the migrant’s trajectory, whether the geographical movement or life cycle, through the lens of ‘waithood’, mobility/immobility, precarity and so on, has a descriptive usefulness but cannot contribute to the politically engaged approach that migration studies should contribute to the realms of policy and activism in a time of emergency. The focus on migrants’ coping skills, isolated from the bigger picture, can constitute acceptance of the economic and political agendas that push people to their limits and tear families apart, especially as it is the most successful people who are in focus and not those who perish. Moreover, the realities of the modern migration regime and unfree forms of labour mobility pose important intellectual challenges in imagining what could happen to borders, cheap labour and freedom of movement in a post-capitalist world.

The left is unified in opposing violent and undignified deportations; the administrative maze and structural violence of detention centres; the erosion of state support for asylum seekers to pre-welfare state levels; and stance of violent racist groups. It is difficult to go beyond opposition to the regime: well-intentioned ‘pro-migrant’ initiatives can become a surreal affair that creates more distance between new migrants and longer-term residents, or sustains the illusion that the receiving society can choose whether or not to have immigrants. A progressive approach will overcome the illusion that clandestine immigration is a choice – something to be liked or disliked, or that it is positive or negative, rather than an inevitable and sometimes tragic outcome of the predatory nature of the world economy, to be dealt with accordingly. The promotion of counter-narratives, solidarity and defence of migrants has shaped progressive movements in the last century and goes to the heart of democratic struggle.

Hannah Cross is author of Migrants, Borders and Global Capitalism: West African labour mobility and EU borders, Routledge 2013. She is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Westminster, and an editor of ROAPE.

Notes

[1] Prime Minister David Cameron said, for example, of migrants attempting to enter the UK from Calais: “you have got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain because Britain has got jobs, it’s got a growing economy, it’s an incredible place to live” [italics added]. Guardian, 30 July 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/30/calais-migrants-make-further-attempts-to-cross-channel-into-britain

[2] Al Jazeera, 21 April 2015, accessible: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/04/iom-mediterranean-death-toll-top-30000-2015-150421232012080.html

[3] Watch the Med, http://watchthemed.net/index.php/reports

[4] Le Monde, 19 April, http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/04/19/le-naufrage-d-un-bateau-de-migrants-fait-craindre-700-morts-en-mediterranee_4618758_3224.html; Guardian, 18 May 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/18/eu-mediterranean-naval-mission-migrant-crisis-people-smugglers-libya; EU Observer, 14 September 2015, https://euobserver.com/justice/130258.

[5] Guardian, 23 June 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/23/eu-to-create-new-quarantine-system-for-mediterranean-migrants.

[6] Traoré, A, 2007. ‘Afrique humiliée’. Paris: Fayard.

[7] Al Jazeera, 7 August 2015. https://twitter.com/AJHeadtoHead/status/629325509017468932

‘Life in a struggle that continues!’

ROAPE

November 23, 2015

By John Saul

The following interview, carried out expertly by my friend David MacDonald of Queen’s University was, several years ago, to have appeared a part of a Festschrift then being prepared in my name. But, as Duke Ellington once said ironically of a similarly failed honour in his twilight years, he was still just too young to yet be famous. Nonetheless, I’m happy to have the interview disinterred by Leo Zeilig here for the inaugural issue of roape.net and hope it may be of interest. In fact, it seems, to me, quite fitting since I was actually onboard as an author in the very first print issue of ROAPE (‘African Peasants and Revolution’) in 1974. Indeed, with one brief hiccough, I’ve 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.

Icon(oclastic): An Interview with John S Saul

John Shannon Saul has come a long way from a North Toronto childhood – at John Ross Robertson Public School and Lawrence Park Collegiate – to an on-going political and intellectual practice well to the left on the Canadian and international political spectrums. Africa has been key here, with periods spent teaching, writing about and participating in attempts to realize profound social, political and economic change – liberation and socialism – in Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa.

And these were also years of active engagement on the left in Canada, working, in particular, as an activist in the southern African/anti-apartheid solidarity movement: seeking to raise committed consciousness amongst Canadians as to the human importance of on-going struggle there. Such a commitment has also involved challenging the social and economic structures – capitalist and imperialist – that so often moved “official Canada” to support the “wrong side” in southern Africa during the years of white dictatorship. Moreover, such structures, Saul has argued, have led Canada to participate to the more recent “recolonization” (by capital) of that region.

An author of note (some 20 volumes over the years and a vast number of academic and popular articles), an editor (This Magazine, Southern Africa Report), an activist (notably with the Toronto Committee for Southern Africa (TCLSAC)), Saul remains committed to anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist work in Canada, Africa and elsewhere.

David McDonald: You’ve been involved in liberation struggles in Southern Africa for a long time. When and why did you first get involved?

John S Saul: I first went to Africa to teach in Tanzania from 1965 to 1972. Those were exciting times; the years of the Arusha Declaration and of the heyday of Tanzanian socialism. I myself became involved, as did many others, in the struggles for change that then took place throughout the society – principally, in my case, in efforts to move the University too in a more socialist-relevant (in terms of pedagogy and academic practice) direction. True, as things transpired, I was soon to be fired for such activities by Canada’s External Aid, my original employer, but I was then strongly encouraged to take up a local contract. This I did quite happily for a number of years (although, as the contradictions inside Tanzania deepened, I was eventually to find that contract terminated as well). But I had learned a great deal and written a lot (especially with Giovanni Arrighi and Lionel Cliffe) during my years in Dar and had made many close friends, both Tanzanians and expatriates.

In addition, Dar es Salaam during those years was the key centre for the various liberation movements engaged in struggle in the white-ruled territories further south – and I got to know them all. This was especially true with respect to Mozambique’s Frelimo for I was soon working with them on their English language publications – while learning a great deal more, as I went along, about what was happening in southern Africa more generally. Then, in 1972, and as I prepared to leave Dar, Samora Machel, Frelimo’s President, came to see me and invited me to travel with a group of Mozambican guerillas deep into their country to see for myself the liberated areas there and to gauge the meaning of Frelimo’s struggle. When I got back to Tanzania from this “long march” Machel then asked me to speak out, when I returned to Canada, about Frelimo’s efforts and about what I had learned. Looking back, I can see that my life-long involvement in the struggle for liberation in southern Africa, and in encouraging Canadians to also take it seriously, was grounded both in this direct experience and in Samora’s request.

DM: In retrospect, the late 1960s and early 70s were particularly fertile years for progressive scholarship and activism in Africa. Were you aware, at the time, of how momentous this period was, and how did it shape the way you saw yourself as a scholar-activist?

JSS: You’re right, it was a fertile moment indeed. In Tanzania, in Mozambique, in southern Africa more generally, you felt that you were swimming with the tide of history for a change, and not merely against it. There were people – I think in particular of Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel – and movements – Frelimo certainly – in which you could ground both your hopes and your writing, as a comrade in revolutionary change as well as a careful scholar: a ‘scholar activist,’ as you say.

Of course, we were well aware of counter-trends: Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth became a particularly resonant point of reference in both my teaching and writing during these years, especially his powerful Chapter 3, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.” We also knew – as I would discover at closer hand when I returned to Canada in 1972 – that western countries and global capitalism itself did not wish such revolutionary aspirations in southern Africa well: indeed Frelimo was to invite me, of all unlikely people, rather than the Canadian government, to come to Maputo on behalf of our now active Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa (TCLPAC) in order to represent the Canadian people at Mozambique’s independence day celebration in 1975 – precisely because Canada had been on the wrong side, the side of Portuguese colonialism, during their struggle!

In short, in a whole host of ways we did know that something momentous was afoot, part of a promising global shift towards socialism and genuine independence that was even more clearly exemplified by Vietnam’s historic victory. And we basked in it and took inspiration from it – even though, momentous as it was, the ‘moment’ of triumph also proved to be transitory. To be honest, we didn’t quite grasp just how fleeting such ‘victories’ would prove to be…or just how strong the forces pulling southern Africa back into the orbit of ‘recolonization’ actually were.

Despite this, there’s no doubting that these instances of genuine accomplishment – like the on-going struggles for freedom that, beyond 1975 and well into the 1990s, continued in Zimbabwe, in Namibia and in South Africa itself – shaped many us profoundly. Cumulatively, living this history helped lock me personally firmly into the role of ‘scholar-activist’ – ever more committed to an anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist politics, to a closely-linked intellectual practice as both teacher and writer, and to the genuine liberation of Africa. As I still am.

DM: Can you expand a bit on the ups and downs of the past 50 years of struggle in the region: What would say have been the biggest successes (sustained or otherwise) and what have been the biggest disappointments?

JSS: The past 50 years have seen both successes and disappointments, the biggest success being, without question, the removal, by armed liberation movements and by dramatic popular mobilization, of the parasitic – ‘evil’ seems not too dramatic a word for it – grip of racist rule as defined by the dominance of whites in firmly institutionalized positions of power (apartheid and the like). Of course, things have not yet turned out quite as many of us had hoped they would in terms of the attendant realization of class and gender equality and the establishment of genuine democratic control by the poorest of the poor in the region. Yet this, in political and cultural terms, was a great triumph – and one that, due to genuinely heroic efforts by the people of southern Africa, occurred rather against the odds.

One must hope that some memory of the accomplishments of the “thirty years war for southern African liberation” (1960-1990) survives, however, for it could be one resource useful to any attempt to spawn a “next liberation struggle.” And, make no mistake: this is what is desperately needed presently in southern Africa. Indeed, to return to the question asked, the “failure” of the region’s liberation struggles, once their leaders had come to power, to make any very dramatic difference, economically and in many other ways, to the lives of the vast mass of the population there constitutes the greatest single disappointment of recent years, both for residents of the region as well as for any committed outsider who would wish the peoples of southern Africa well. Put simply, in fact, the region has been recolonized by global capital in the wake of its ostensible liberation and the grim results – in terms both of continuing poverty and exploitation by capital, both global and local, and of an absence of any meaningful popular empowerment – are all too evident.

DM: The neoliberal turn of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa has been one of these disappointments. Mainstream analysts tell us that the ANC had no choice but to become market-friendly – given the collapse of the Soviet Union and the potential for white, reactionary revolt – and yet there seemed to be a period in the early 1990s where a more transformative politics seemed possible. What, if anything, do you think could have shifted the balance at that time?

JSS: The simplest answer would be that the ANC leadership had come, primarily, to represent aspirant black middle-class elements (a tendency never, from the outset, far from the surface of the movement in any case) who saw little advantage, to themselves, to lie in the pursuit of more egalitarian and socialist policies. The Soviet Union argument is a bit of a canard here because, although that country had been close to many in the ANC leadership, it exemplified no real socialist alternative anyway, entirely hostile to the kind of democratic empowerment of the mass of the South African population that could alone have dissuaded the ANC leadership from taking the line of least resistance towards global capitalism.

That said, it is obviously true that great pressure springing from the global capitalist system was also crucial. As were both “white” mining, financial and commercial capital players within the country itself and the full range of additional black aspirants, from within the state and private sectors (the Black Economic Empowerment set), to personal economic advancement. To deflect these various pressures would have required a great deal more commitment to popular mobilization and continuing struggle to realize a broad-scale liberation than the ANC (including, I’m sorry to say, Mandela himself) was interested in.

For starters there was probably more room for active popular empowerment, egalitarian policies, and defiance of imperial dictate – in the honeymoon period of possibility that existed after first overcoming apartheid at any rate – than the ANC ever conceived of availing itself of. The questions then multiply: Did the ANC elite become just too comfortable in their own novel power and privilege? Were they simply tired of struggle? Or perhaps too nervous about the risks involved in defying a generally hostile world? Or what?

For the fact is (as Rusty Bernstein has argued) that, either due to mere class opportunism or to failure of nerve, they turned their backs on genuine mass politics (running down rather than further enabling any independent and on-going UDF [United Democratic Front] initiative, for example) – and on real popular liberation. They thus settled comfortably for SA’s becoming, in Neville Alexander’s chilling characterization of the country’s post-apartheid landscape, “just another country,” one marked by the acceptance, on the part of the ANC, of extreme inequality and of a very soft landing indeed for both global capital and the new African elite.

DM: And what of the other members of the Alliance – Cosatu and the SACP. What is your take on their acquiescence at that time?

JSS: On the COSATU side, with liberation the union made a fateful miscalculation – a failure, encouraged by the ANC, to cast its lot with various grass-roots organizations still struggling within “civil society” but instead to link itself ever more closely to the party in power. But this absorption – oh, so tempting, even for a movement that had been so crucial to the resistance to apartheid inside South Africa – into a (not terribly effective) proximity to power was also being reinforced by sociological and organizational trends. An increasingly high percentage of workers in South Africa were marginalized, semi-employed and/or informally-employed and certainly not organized (within COSATU or any other union body). Increasingly, COSATU (and its leaders!) has found itself the organization of a kind of labour aristocracy, incapable of reaching out to the vast mass of the unorganized and the marginalized in both the urban and rural areas in order to build the left force that the ANC has refused to become.

The SACP, for its part, was, historically, a pretty Stalinist outfit, important though its links to the Soviet Union had been in getting the ANC favoured status as a movement to be armed and otherwise assisted. Neither the Soviet Union nor the SACP directed the ANC of course, but the SACP did have an important role in shaping the ANC’s form of “radicalism,” albeit one of a distinctly Stalinist, vanguardist and not particularly left character: much more rhetorical than real, as events would soon show. At the same time, the SACP was also imprisoning itself within a nationalist movement problematic – where it still finds itself. It has a certain radical base, and some of its members are now mildly left-wing Ministers (under Zuma). But the party is chiefly to be thought of as just one more agent of ANC power, wielded from above.

In short, both COSATU and the SACP remain players within post-apartheid South Africa, but players who have been primarily defined by their short-sighted opportunism: definitely, at the moment, part of the country’s problem rather than part of its solution!

DM: Where does this leave the struggle for more radical liberation in South Africa today? What are the potential rupture points, who can pry them open, and how might things be done?

JSS: Living now far from the frontline, I’ll refrain from offering too precise a recipe as to the most effective and appropriate form of on-going struggle. Nonetheless, some facts are clear. There are vast numbers of people who are dissatisfied in South Africa and with good reason. This discontent can all too easily curdle, as we have seen, into crime, xenophobia, violence against women and the like in the absence of a convincing and resonant counter-hegemonic socio-economic imaginary and a movement that can give such an imaginary full expression. In other words, the challenge for the aggrieved is to craft increasingly effective long-term vehicles that give clearer and more sustained political voice to their grievances and through which they could press them ever more forcefully and appositely.

Of course, one has already seen many such positive expressions of protest, the apparent building blocks of a counter-hegemony so to speak. I felt, for example, that I saw something of this for myself as early as 2002 when I had the opportunity to join many thousands (20,000 plus) of demonstrators, representing the Anti-Privatization Forum, the Landless People’s Movement and the like, as we marched from impoverished Alexandra township to affluent Sandton to protest against the ANC (it was then hosting in Johannesburg a World Summit on Social Development) – although, unfortunately, at the time, such protest could not long sustain itself at that high level. But I also felt the same kind of oppositional energy to be close at hand when I was invited to speak, in Cape Town and under the banner of the Municipal Services Project, to a large and impressive workshop of activists from the townships and rural settlements in 2007. It was difficult, in fact, not to sense that the initiatives those comrades represented were the seeds of something much broader in the making.

Even more striking are the statistics of fledgling resistance to the present system’s severe defaults – as expressed in short-falls in housing, electricity supply, water and sanitation, in the lack of availability of meaningful skill-training and of jobs, and in the massive inequality that is now twinned so dramatically to wide-spread corruption. “Service delivery protests,” as they are termed, are rampant, said to be at a rate that is among the very highest in the world – and the level of very real anger is also marked. True, such anger has still not found its voice as a firm, coordinated and proto-hegemonic political force. Nonetheless it is around such issues, and with the further release of these palpable popular energies, that the dispiriting stalemate and profound sense of anti-climax that has come to define post-apartheid South Africa might really be beginning to be “pried open.”

DM: As you note, much of this new resistance is being led by social movements and community groups, often in conflict with unions that are seen to be too cozy with the ANC. Some commentators see this as a healthy move away from restrictive ‘class’ politics that open up of a broader potential for counter-hegemonic action and dialogue, while others are concerned that it runs the risk of losing coherent analytical punch and practical force. What are your thoughts on this?

JSS: I think that, despite some small risk of a possible loss of focus and clout in the formula you first suggest, it is indeed time to get away from any too rigid a preoccupation with exclusively class-derived concepts of revolutionary agency – not least with regard to southern Africa. Of course, Marx had good reason to emphasize the role of the working class in divining potentially revolutionary contradictions within a capitalist mode of production: it was the most exploited (at least in the technical sense in which he deployed the word) and is also brought together as a potentially self-conscious class by the very capitalist dynamic of concentration and centralization that has also defined its exploitation. It is not surprising that Marx’s formulation has served as the staple of left thinking and action for generations.

Yet there is a vast multitude beyond the ranks of the organized working class (and their work-places) who also live, in southern Africa, in teeming urban and peri-urban settings where social inequality is at its most extreme. There is a whole range of legitimate urban grievances – service delivery (health, housing, electricity, water, education and so much more) and unemployment, for starters – that are on the agenda and that people are seeking to deal with directly at the grass-roots and on their home ground. And this is not even to begin to speak about the more desperate situation in many of the rural areas – from where people are teeming to the cities!

Here I’ll throw in a favourite quotation of mine, if you’ll permit me, one that is entirely apposite I think. It’s from a book by Ken Post and Phil Wright and it hits the mark directly:

The working out of capitalism in parts of the periphery prepares not only the minority working class but peasants and other working people, women, youth and minorities for a socialist solution, even though the political manifestation of this may not initially take the form of a socialist movement. In the case of those who are not wage labourers (the classical class associated with that new order) capitalism has still so permeated the social relations which determine their existences…that to be liberated from it is their only salvation. The objective need for socialism of these elements can be no less than that of the worker imprisoned in the factory and disciplined by the whip of unemployment. The price [of capitalism] is paid in even the most “successful” of the underdeveloped countries, and others additionally experience mass destitution. Finding another path has…become a desperate necessity if the alternative of continuing, if not increasing, barbarism is to be escaped.

Yes! But bear in mind too that “the working class,” even when so broadly and inclusively defined, is cut across by fissures and hierarchies and divisions (along lines of race, ethnicity and gender, to go no further afield) that can impede its self-consciousness and its collective practice. Moreover, self-evidently, such identities can also speak to grievances and demands that are entirely “real” in their own right and therefore cannot be glibly reduced and subordinated to the rigid terms of a slogan like “class struggle.”

Yet such identities and the grievances they give rise to cannot stand alone either. For they are best understood as festering most flagrantly within the selfish, unequal and individualistic ethos of a capitalist society. I’d say that the bearers of such identities – alongside feminists, environmentalists, anti-racists, activists around issues of sexual orientation and the like – must join into a broader community-in-the-making and within a universalizing project of anti-capitalist transformation. That’s what the best of militants in South Africa and beyond are beginning to do even as we speak.

Note, too, one other corollary of this kind of approach to “movement building.” For the inevitable tensions and differences of emphasis between the bearers of such diverse goals and purposes will not then simply disappear, even under the umbrella of a broadly shared socialist purpose. In short, no “vanguardist edict” can cancel out the necessity that such a project be a firmly democratic one. This enlarged definition of “class struggle” underscores the pressing need for more open methods of negotiation of both the means and the ends of revolutionary work than has characterized most past socialist undertakings. This will be true both in mobilizing the forces to launch revolutionary change and in sustaining the process of socialist construction in the long run. Hard work plus genuine democracy then – but South Africans have a future to win.

DM: How does one operationalize this democratic process/practice in South Africa, where there is a dominant party that claims left-wing credentials yet marginalizes any radical thought and action, a union movement and communist party that shows few signs of progressive resistance, and a fragmented and under-resourced set of social movements, particularly in rural areas? When compared to Latin America, South Africa seems a long way from any sustained anti-capitalist realization. What is your practical advice to people working on the ground?

JSS: A very tough question. You can see why I’ve chosen to become an historian in my old age, primarily seeking to trace the evolution of the “thirty years war” (1960-1990) for southern African liberation both in the region itself and, as a world-wide liberation support/anti-apartheid movement, more globally. In fact, I feel myself (as I said previously) to now be just too far from the nitty-gritty of struggles on the ground in southern Africa to any longer have a real “right to speak” on such pressing contemporary matters.

That said, I do feel the way you summarize the current situation is accurate, albeit quite bleakly phrased. But at the same time it’s a bit like the futility and disempowerment many of us, both in the region itself and beyond, felt some fifty years ago – after Sharpeville and the like. To argue that the Portuguese, the Rhodies and the Nats could all be defeated: now that really seemed fanciful. But, of course, it wasn’t.

Moreover, it ain’t over yet – that’s what I would want to say to people on the ground (who don’t really need me to tell them this, in any case). True, some would argue that there are too many on the left in South Africa who merely “wallow” in a “sell-out” narrative regarding the ANC and what has happened in the past 20 years in the country. But I’m not convinced that this is the true. In fact, most of the skeptics (skeptical, to be clear, regarding the actual liberatory content of “liberation”) whom I know well are largely correct in their negative evaluations of what has occurred in South Africa.

More importantly, most such skeptics are also, in fact, actively involved simultaneously in the kind of painstaking work – within “civil society” and the interstices of the system (from the Treatment Action Campaign to the Anti-Privatisation Forum) – that gives promise of real human betterment and substantive change. At minimum, such work is immensely helpful and healing – on very many fronts – to ordinary people in the present difficult moment. But one senses that it is also sowing the seeds of the kind of more general challenge to the status quo – “radical reform,” in the militant sense of that concept forged by Gorz and Kagarlitzky – that promises, cumulatively, to be substantively revolutionary. Here, in short, is the basis for the necessary “next liberation struggle” in South/southern Africa that I have evoked in the title of a recent book of mine.

True, it is certainly the case that such instances of resistance as continue to manifest themselves in southern Africa haven’t yet begun to “add up” into a forceful counter-hegemonic movement (as they apparently have begun to do in some parts of Latin America, for example). The ANC still lives, for popular consumption, off its liberation history and its “struggle credentials.” And, as I said earlier, COSATU and the SACP are far too comfortable with their “insider” status to help in overcoming the fragmentation of the left and in facilitating any efforts by others to wage, publicly and entirely confidently, full-fledged anti-capitalist struggle. And these are problems, to put it mildly.

But this is simply to say, trite but true, that “the struggle continues.” Myself, perhaps I’m just too Irish to quit. More generally, though, we must take hope from the fact that the numbers (made up of the vast and swelling ranks of the exploited and the marginalized) are, potentially, on our side, the revolutionary side, in southern Africa – and more globally as well! Here’s the basis for what I once called, in South Africa, a possible “small-a alliance” of popular forces (as distinct from the “big-A alliance” of the ANC, the SACP and COSATU): a genuine and increasingly effective movement in the making, what the late Fatima Meer was no doubt anticipating when she spoke of the need for a “South African Social Forum” separate from and opposed to the wielders of established power. Of course, the other side (“imperialism” and its local hench-men) is trying too, but the stakes – in terms of human decency, equity and equality – are simply too high for us, here or there, to merely walk away from the table.

DM: And what of other countries in the region, where social and class forces are very different and where many nations remain under the (sub)imperial thumb of a re-energized South Africa? Do you see similar potential for ‘small-a’ alliances? If so, where, and what is the potential for a broader regional (or even pan-African) anti-capitalist movement in the next 10-20 years?

JSS: For the moment South Africa seems the most promising site for the genesis of a counter-hegemonic political project – and we’ve already discussed just how difficult it is to see anything transformative happening anytime soon even there. Elsewhere in the region the prospect for a renewed challenge to the debilitating stranglehold of global capital and its local ‘puppets’ (a term I don’t feel comfortable in using but, under the circumstances, it’s difficult to think of an alternative) is even less immediately promising.

For example, I’ve recently felt forced to write extremely pessimistically of Mozambique in whose national left experiment I had once invested many of my own hopes. And Zimbabwe, so bedeviled by the horrors perpetrated by Mugabe and his cruel coterie of ZANU followers (and by the support this gang receives from countries like South Africa, Mozambique…and China), has seen the high hopes once placed in the more promising kind of opposition originally offered by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) there forced to wither. Angola, Namibia: not pretty pictures either, as other contributors to the volume of Africafiles I’ve just referred to soberly attest.

As for myself, I’ve also written both an article a year or two ago on what I called “the strange death of liberated southern Africa” and another on the far too narrow notion of “liberation” that we have been content to settle for – national and racial liberation (up to a point), but not also a parallel liberation in class, gender and other terms. In evaluating the liberation struggle in southern Africa in these broader terms, the results of the “liberation struggle” must thus be seen as having been very mixed – and I speak as one who devoted a great many years to liberation support and anti-apartheid work both in the region itself and also here in Canada.

But as I’ve already told you, I’ve now become a card-carrying historian and consequently have felt constrained to hand in my crystal ball and to return my “prognosticator-of-the-future” badge. That doesn’t mean I no longer care about future outcomes and, in fact, the “next 10-20 years” that you mention does seem like a long time, with the situation – in terms of inequality and sheer penury, of disease (AIDS, for starters) and malnutrition, of environmental despoliation – just too drastic for us to easily imagine that people, especially in the global South, will passively accept their “fate.”

Dare to struggle, dare to win: I quite simply don’t feel I/we have got any other choice, as trite as that cliché sounds and as bleak as things look right now. But I’ll keep any of the dark thoughts about the future that occasionally assail me to myself, if you don’t mind. Instead, I’ll hope to continue to hear more hopeful ones both from engaged activists on the ground who are seeking to assist more positive things to happen there and also from other contributors to this volume who, more actively than I am now able to do, are taking the pulse of the theory and practice of the moment.

DM: Let’s return, then, to the 1970s, and your role in creating awareness about, and activism against, repression in Southern Africa from your home base in Canada. You were instrumental in the establishment and continuation of the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portugal’s African Colonies (TCLPAC) (later the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa (TCLSAC)), and an editor of Southern Africa Report (from 1985-2000). What impact did these organizations and publications have on the anti-apartheid struggle in Canada and on Canada’s official (or unofficial) policies towards oppressive regimes in the region?

JSS: I’ve actually written quite a bit on this (as have others), including in my own memoir, Revolutionary Traveller, and also in a long report I’ve recently done about the North American front of struggle for a research project, sponsored by the region’s own Southern African Development Community, on the world-wide liberation support/anti-apartheid movement. It’s very difficult to tell our precise impact on western policy, of course. What we can say at minimum, perhaps, is that our efforts and those of other like-minded militants across Canada communicated to and reinforced the confidence of the liberation movements in the region itself by demonstrating that they were not without friends and supporters in Canada and other imperial centres (whose elites otherwise tended, for commercial and investment reasons, to back white power).

That said, we also ruffled the feathers of the right people, corporate and governmental, here in Canada with our campaigns that targeted government complicity with racial rule and corporate “investment in oppression.” We hosted the liberation movements in Canada, we wrote and publicized the situation, through various media, a lot, we held endless meetings (including our popular “Cinema of Solidarity” series), and we mounted what we felt to be imaginative assaults upon such things as government support for Portugal through NATO, Canadian banks and their unconscionable loans to apartheid, Gulf Oil Canada’s exploitative involvement in Angola, the Hudson’s Bay Company and its pursuit of karakul pelts in Namibia, and Canadian mining companies like Falconbridge in a variety of regional settings. We know, for example, that, in retaliation, Gulf Oil infiltrated a corporate spy into our TCLPAC ranks during our public campaigns against the company in the 1970s, and though we caught and expelled him pretty quickly who knows how many others may have sought to follow in his wake; we were extremely open and transparent (and “penetrable”) in our activities after all. Who knows? Just last year, for example, when I finally managed to extract the CSIS file on TCLPAC/TCLSAC from the National Archives it was, quite legally but entirely immorally, stripped by the government of well over 50 percent of its contents – for “security reasons,” it was said, albeit 30 or 40 years after the fact! What remains does speak, furtively, to moments of governmental infiltration by individuals (names not revealed!) into our ranks, but who knows what else was on those whited-out pages!

It was the successes of the movements in the region itself that made the main running, of course. Soon the Mulroney government – though, fixated on “terrorists” and “reds,” it remained extremely reluctant to give any aid and comfort to the liberation movements themselves, including the ANC – was faced with the reality of the latter’s success, the parallel success of wide-spread popular resistance in the townships and beyond, as well as some continuing embarrassment at home (we liked to think). At that point, “official Canada” began to distance itself from apartheid (well before Reagan, before Thatcher, who were both more racist than Mulroney could ever be), becoming a prominent cheerleader for “liberation as recolonization.” Our government now readied itself, in short, to egg on Canadian corporations to join in on the suffocating embrace of the “New South Africa” by the global “Empire of Capital”: business and exploitation as usual, hold the racism please.

So, by the end of the thirty years war for southern African liberation it was clear that we, in the region and beyond, had won a significant victory. And yet it was also a pyrrhic one: difficult, in short, to know whether to cheer or to cry, especially as the modesty of the ANC’s intentions once in power became apparent. In Toronto we did keep our own magazine, Southern Africa Report/SAR, going until 2000 hoping to be an active part in any on-going struggle in southern Africa that might be forthcoming. But, to most Canadians, the initial appearances of liberation were more graphic than was the sober reality apparently. Though many militants from the anti-apartheid days did move on to other fronts of the global justice struggle, the movement in Canada for equity and equality in southern Africa had, like apartheid itself, simply melted away.

DM: What does this say about the Canadian political psyche? Although blatant racism mobilizes anger and resistance, more complex debates over the nature of capitalism seem increasingly difficult to sustain in a popularized way. What can we do in Canada today to generate better and more widespread understandings of ongoing inequities in South(ern) Africa?

JSS: National political psyches: I’m not sure I know how to think about those. But the problem you allude to is a real one, nonetheless – and I’m afraid it’s not just germane to understanding our responses to southern Africa. For starters the situation in most of the Global South is the real issue here. And yet the truth is that for many – most? – Canadians the gross inequalities that define the gap between the world’s rich and the world’s poor seems to be fielded as being, at best, the unavoidable “common-sense” of the market-place and, at worst, a matter of mere indifference. The fact is that we’re very far from being self-conscious members of a real global community, one built on empathy and mutual caring and respect, and the results of this you can see quite clearly – if you care to look.

Mind you, the same is true even closer to home. Canada itself is a pretty unequal society, and becoming all the more so all the time as our local chapter of “the architects and beneficiaries of the system of global greed” distinguishes itself ever more sharply in terms of income and life-style from the “creatures” set below it in the social hierarchy. My son is the executive director of a community food centre in West Toronto and he lives such contradictions every day. His organization is doing good work and helping make some difference but he would love to make the accessibility of good healthy food for all a matter of right, not market-defined privilege – and not a matter of mere “charity” either. He finds it difficult enough work to make such points here; how much more difficult it is at the global level.

Of course, this global picture is the subject of much hand-wringing amongst the “caring classes” – and even lefties can sometimes get discouraged. Thus a friend with a shared commitment to Africa writes to me recently that (if I may quote) “I don’t see how the South can ever liberate itself in the absence of a new socialist project becoming powerful in the North and I don’t see that happening until people are hurting and see no prospect of meeting their personal needs under globalized neoliberalism, and until a new left movement with a serious attitude to organization and democracy (to both, that is) emerges to displace the social democratic collaborators with capital.” His conclusion: “All of which means that very much against my will and my nature I feel very pessimistic.”

As noted above, I’m not quite so inclined towards pessimism, although I can understand this kind of response. And my correspondent may also understate the will and the scope for local action, at once radical and transformative, in the Global South itself. But at least this letter has the virtue of bringing the problem right back here to our own doorstep. We must, of course, continue, to support southern Africans in their efforts to help themselves by all means; many of us spent a lot of time over the years doing just that and we need make no apologies for having done so. But we must also continue to work to challenge and to change the global system from the centre, beginning right here in Canada too: work, in short, for equity and for the continuing viability of the global environment!

Unfortunately, our own national government refuses to hear the terrible tidings about injustice and ecological vulnerability and about the very real inability of “the market” to magically deliver fair and mutually beneficial social outcomes. What we actually need, I continue to think, is the more self-conscious challenge to the workings of the market – a real not rhetorical project of socialism – mounted by popular majorities committed to social and economic justice. I sense that many Canadians, old and young, are beginning to wake up to the pressing environmental challenges that face us…and, perhaps, they are also becoming more aware of the many other weaknesses and dangers of our market and dominant-class driven system. So much depends on many more people doing so, both here in Canada and elsewhere.

DM: I note the phrase “I continue to think,” when you talk about the need to resist the logic of the market. Your commitment to this goal has been noteworthy in an era of trendy shifts in academia. What has changed for you intellectually since the 1960s and what remains the same.

JSS: I sense a whole other interview coming on, since this is, in itself, a very big question. But fortunately it’s also something I’ve written about elsewhere (most recently in “Is Socialism a Real Alternative?” in Studies in Political Economy, 2010) so I’ll try to be brief. To begin with, my understanding of the logic of global capitalism that I first began to articulate with Giovanni Arrighi and others in my Tanzania days has remained, to the present, pretty much the same in broad outline. I simply see no reason to think of global capitalism as being developmental in any expansive and egalitarian sense of the word, but rather as having been and remaining primarily parasitical and hurtful in Africa. In short, “delinking” the central dynamic of the economy of “Third World countries” from the global market-place is crucial, as Samir Amin emphasizes.

Note, please, that this is not some simple-minded plea for autarky. There are, of course, useful and societally profitable external links an economy in the global South can and must avail itself of. But such links will not automatically make developmental sense in any sound and democratically meaningful sense unless these links are subordinated to a new internal logic for the economy concerned. And this must mean the primacy of conscious collective intervention that overrides any apparent “market logic” (a false, if seductive, quasi-logic that actually favours the strong in the world economy over the weak). This in turn would allow for crafting an internally-focused, not externally-focused, economy for the country concerned, one that links the city’s productive activities and consumer needs to the productive activities and consumer needs of the countryside in an ever expanding set of exchanges – thus providing the basis for a “socialism of expanded reproduction,” as Clive Thomas has effectively characterized it. Am I just being stubborn by sticking to my last on this and other economic and social fronts? Well, the fact is that capitalism just hasn’t worked for the vast majority of the world’s citizens, and shows no signs of doing so. The socialist goal and vision therefore remains for me, in this and other particulars, the preferred option.

Of course, the socialist vision has itself taken a ferocious pounding, especially by the end of the twentieth century. And this has been not only the work of imperialism. For there have certainly been severe weaknesses in the so-called socialist camp itself. Here I do feel that, in my own negative take on the Soviet Union and its progeny, I was pretty consistent. But I was much too soft on vanguardism – as exercised, for example, in Mozambique (a country I thought I knew well). For there is no evidence that vanguards can be trusted for long anywhere, however benign their original intentions may have been. Leaders (for they have a role) simply have to be controlled democratically – from below, by the very populations in whose names they claim to speak. In short, socialism has to be profoundly democratic (although, at the same time, it must also be genuinely socialist, something that “social democrats” have forgotten time and time again – to our cost).

In short, I’m no less a socialist but ever more of an unqualified democrat than once I was. But I’ve adjusted my thinking on other fronts too. For example, I’m more open to expanding the definition of potential revolutionary agents along the lines I’ve suggested in quoting Post and Wright to you above: to include peasants, yes, but, especially, to embrace, in Africa, the full range of urban-dwellers, well beyond the organized working-class. And I’m even less inclined to reduce resistances based on gender, race, religion, ethnic and anti-authoritarian political demands to their presumed “class belongings” but to see them as making rightful claims to expression and to redress in their own terms. They can, of course, give rise to political expressions of both right and left provenance. So just how they can be encouraged to intersect with class/socialist projects is a matter of creative political work – and negotiation and democratic interchange as well.

It also underscores the need to move away from mere revolutionary rhetoric and incantation as well – though not away from the cause of genuinely radical and structural change. Here I’ve found the thinking of Gorz and Kagarlitzky on “structural reform” especially suggestive and I’ve tried to expand on it elsewhere. Two points here, however. Firstly, any reform, to be “structural” in the sense I’m seeking to evoke, must be understood by those who press for and achieve it not as a single, self-contained event but, as a step taken, self-consciously, as part of a longer term struggle for genuinely radical transformation. Secondly, the organization and empowerment of the popular elements that prove necessary to realize any such short-term campaigns of would be “structural reform” can also be seen as contributing to the broader and more general self-organization that will prove necessary to the undertaking of even broader struggles for transformation in future.

Moreover, such an emphasis of popular engagement and genuine empowerment once again implies a democratic process of revolution-making – a process that, as I have argued, can only have long term positive effects. At the same time, one mustn’t be naïve: the side of resistance to revolutionary change – the dominant class, its military and its external backers (as in many of the struggles against white power during the initial years of liberation struggle in southern Africa) – will often play pretty violent hard-ball indeed. Then the escalation of confrontation may sometimes, of necessity, pass beyond the boundaries of anything like “structural reform” – with, unfortunately, long-term costs to socialist and democratic outcomes that, even if the “good guys” win, can be very severe.

Of course, the cost, human and political, of any such necessary escalation is one of the main reasons we in Canada and elsewhere in the West fight so hard (as we did during the stormiest days of the war for southern African liberation) against the state and corporate structures and class interests prevalent here that have so often put our governments on the wrong side of struggles for freedom in the global South – and continue to do just that. But this all evokes issues that demand continuing reflection on my part, and, no doubt, lots more to say in due course.

DM: And finally, what is next for John S Saul? Your works in progress suggest no quiet retirement!

JSS: I wouldn’t hope for the latter certainly; in fact, once you have tasted the bittersweet fruit of knowledge as to the way the world actually functions there is no retirement you can easily permit yourself from the class struggle. Now, of course, my prevailing mode of struggle is through my computer (used as a glorified typewriter) – for as long, at any rate, as my physical and mental faculties remain sufficiently intact to permit me to form comprehensible sentences and coherent arguments. Such is my lot – and I ain’t complaining.

Along such lines I last year produced a memoir Revolutionary Traveller (from Arbeiter Ring in Winnipeg) – a memoir that was actually in large part a story of the southern African struggle and of our efforts here in Canada to support it. And I’ve just finished Liberation Lite: The Roots of Recolonization in Southern Africa for India’s Three Essays Collective and Africa World Press, a book that reflects on the aftermath of the southern Africans’ victory over colonialism and on the region’s future prospects. Meanwhile, wearing my present cap as “historian,” I have, at various stages of gestation, three more books I’d like to complete by the time I’m 80: a history of South Africa for James Currey; a recounting of what I call “the thirty years war for southern African liberation, 1960-1990,” for Cambridge UP; and an evaluation of the world-wide, southern Africa-focused liberation support/anti apartheid movement, once again for Arbeiter Ring. After that, he said jokingly (gallows humour!), we’ll see.

For my wife and kids also take priority, and, as befits my age, so do my four grandchildren, all of them here in Toronto at various ages and each a source of endless delight. I like to read, too, dozens of thrillers, but I also revel in George Eliot, Conrad, James, and Robertson Davies, Richard Ford, Colm Toibim, David Eggars and Jane Gardam, among many others. And I’m forging on with my Proust, determined to finally conquer it during my eighth decade.

In addition, I listen to a lot of jazz, go to the opera, Stratford and Soulpepper theaters, and watch an endless number of old movies at Cinemetheque and on TV – from Stanwyck to Mitchum and Gabin, Randolph Scott to Eleanor Powell and Olivia de Havilland, and including such favourite directors as Michael Powell, Lang, Anthony Mann, Michael Haneke, Hawks, Oshima and Budd Boetticher – and various classic TV dramas on video: Six Feet Under, Lost, Homicide, The Wire. I didn’t stop playing basketball until I was 70 either (it was at about the same time that I taught my last class at York), and, while I haven’t found an equivalently satisfying form of exercise, I do still watch the game with immense enjoyment (including my grandson’s team, coached by my son!). In short, there is life after retirement: it is called life in retirement – and it’s also, for me, life in a struggle that continues!

Economic Trickery, Fraud and Crime in Africa

ROAPE

November 18, 2015

By Jörg Wiegratz

The contemporary global economy is characterised by a significant level of economic trickery, fraud and crime in many business sectors. Notably, after two decades of light-touch regulation of the economy during the rise and height of neoliberalism, a number of states in both the Global North and the Global South have recently started to undertake countermeasures in the name of detecting and reducing fraudulent activities in their economies. In Africa, these initiatives have included attempts to restrict tax evasion, financial crimes and trade in sub-standard goods, amongst others. These regulatory initiatives, inspections and crackdowns to ‘clean up’ the economy are complemented by activities of consumer protection organisations that demand to regulate problematic business practices. The phenomena of corporate fraud and anti-fraud measures remain largely understudied, not only but especially in Africa. There are several reasons for that, one of them being the almost exclusive focus of the international donor and aid community over the last two decades on matters of political corruption (as part of the concern with ‘governance’ and the state). That has left off the radar the whole issue of private sector fraud, especially in everyday sectors such as health, education, food and agriculture including agro inputs. This situation has slightly changed recently given the string of revelations about financial sector fraud, tax evasion, production and trade of sub-standard goods, and official concerns about the money laundering and ‘terrorism financing’. Some of the above issues have received considerable official attention; for instance the illicit financial flows agenda (http://www.uneca.org/iff). We want to foster this debate.

We are looking forward to receiving your articles and contributions to this important project and we welcome submissions for instance from NGOs, government officials, academics, transporters, detectives, private security professionals, journalists or students.

This project space is therefore dedicated to the reporting about and analysis of two themes: first, economic fraud, trickery and crime, and, second, measures undertaken by state and non-state actors to address, counter and contain fraud and crime in the economy. The purpose of the project is to have a platform for the regular exchange of up-to-date information, opinions and analysis about these important phenomena, covering all African countries. We hope this will lead to the built-up of a network of people who for one reasons or another know and have to say something about the topic. We encourage anyone who wants to contribute to this platform to get in contact with the coordinator, Jörg Wiegratz (j.wiegratz@leeds.ac.uk). We have in mind to have pieces of around 1000 words in length. We are interested in pieces that shed light on all sorts of dimensions of the topic, including, of course, relevant political-economic characteristics. That is, for instance the political-economic drivers, characteristics and repercussions of fraud and/or anti-fraud activities in particular countries, i.e. the pressures, dilemmas, inconsistencies, conflicts, and power dynamics as well as renewed episodes of fraud, corruption and violence. This will provide a critical understanding of some of the key ground-level dynamics of, for instance, the fight against fraud, including those that contribute to actual fraud containment and reduction. Overall, we believe the study of fraud and anti-fraud can tell us something important about all sorts of topics of interest to political economy enthusiasts: the state, the economy, and social dynamics, to name only three.

Dr. Jörg Wiegratz is a lecturer in the Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and a member of the editorial board of RoAPE.

The BRICS New Development Bank and Africa

ROAPE

November 16, 2015

By Gary Littlejohn

Part 1: The IMF in Terminal Decline?

This set of three little essays is intended to outline the context in which the recent widely publicised BRICS initiatives have been taking place. In particular, the inauguration of new international banks is seen as a response to the dominance of Western finance capital and the failure of the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ neoliberal orthodoxy that has produced negative economic effects worldwide, but nowhere more so than in developing countries.

Africa, which has about 16 per cent of the world’s population but only about two per cent of GDP and trade, has been particularly badly affected by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) demanded by the IMF and World Bank as the price of ‘ensuring macroeconomic stability’ in indebted developing countries. The European Commission (EC) has ensured compliance with the SAPs by making such programmes a condition of aid and trade with the European Union. This has been secured through formal agreements with African governments, starting with various phases of the Lome Convention, and continuing through the Cotonou Agreement and various Economic Partnership Agreements.

The discussion of recent events in Europe in Part 2 is intended to show that such policies and programmes are by no means accidental, or merely focussed on developing countries/emerging economies. In fact, following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, similar issues have cropped up in Europe, thereby clearly indicating that the associated problems are systemic. Yet they are not being adequately addressed.

Changing context of International Finance Institutions (IFIs)

One need look no further than Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents for a critique of the institutional functioning of the IMF. Criticisms of its policies and actions in Africa over the past 40 years are widespread. Now it is faced with two major problems: it is alleged to have broken its own rules and guidelines in the cases of Greece and Ukraine, and a new set of institutional rivals have been established. Evidently the latter development is more important, but the former, if true, is indicative of the IMF’s apparent attempt to maintain the status quo at a time when the centre of gravity of the world economy is shifting to the Far East.

The new rivals such as the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank (AIIB) have been founded largely because efforts by heavyweight IMF member states to obtain reform the IMF from within have proved fruitless, and even when proposals for reform have been agreed, they have been blocked by the US Senate. These new institutional developments seem to form part of a wider, more long-term strategy by Russia and China to restructure the basis for international trade by reducing the importance of the petrodollar as the de facto world reserve currency.

It has not been widely noticed that both Russia and China have been asking for payment in gold for much of their international trading, and in the case of Russia at least, where it has accepted US dollars or another currency, it has rapidly moved to use this currency to buy gold. This is not ‘paper gold’, that is, certificates declaring that one has a right withdraw gold from a vault located elsewhere, but actual bullion gold. China too requires payment in bullion gold, even from the USA, at least at times. China has also established a new gold vault for international trading purposes on the artificial island constructed for the new Hong Kong airport some years ago. China was unhappy when an attempt was made a few years ago to deliver tungsten covered in ‘gold’ paint instead of genuine gold bars, so they doubtless scrutinise such deliveries very carefully now. In addition, both China and Russia have recently declared that they are going to mine more gold on their own territories. This means that the proportion of total global gold reserves held in these two countries will soon rise to even higher levels. Russia already holds a preponderant proportion of total global gold reserves. It has recently openly discussed the possibility of inaugurating a gold-backed currency.

Such a move in itself would be a blow to the present dominant system of fractional banking and fiat money creation that is currently centred on London and New York. Evidently the Russian economy is not yet strong enough to make this move, but its resilience in the face of difficulties and its strong resource base on which other economies depend (including natural gas) suggest that this might one day prove to be feasible. Meanwhile, there has been no major international banking reform since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and none is apparently envisaged, with Western politicians capitulating to financial capital on major policy issues, and even on the location of large bank headquarters. No bank is really too big to fail, and serious reform would have been possible after the taxpayer-funded bailouts of 2008.

A further noteworthy development has been that the current mild, shallow recession in Russia (induced by the decline in the oil price and by Western economic sanctions over its alleged role in Crimea and eastern Ukraine) has been dealt with in a slightly unexpected way. Not only did the floating exchange rate for the Ruble help to cushion the Russian economy against these setbacks, but interest rates were kept high after the Ruble stabilised at the end of last year. These continued high interest rates above the rate of inflation can best be interpreted as an anti-inflationary measure. In the short run, this has hit the poor in Russia, who still constitute 22 per cent of the population, but in the longer term, low inflation will benefit the poor, if it is accompanied by strong, diversified, technically innovative economic growth. We seem to be witnessing the development of a ‘sound currency’ policy aimed at choking off inflation for the long term. That could be a prelude to establishing the Ruble as one of the basket of currencies in a future replacement of the US petrodollar. Saudi Arabia’s recent overtures to Russia might be seen in this light, since the Saudis may anticipate the decline of the current petrodollar system.

On top of these measures, both Russia and China have been signing a series of bilateral deals with various countries that enable each party to trade in their own currencies, thereby avoiding use of the US dollar. This quite extensive set of agreements could be seen as being at least a kind of insurance against a dollar collapse, which would be understandable given the current systemic instability in global financial markets. The fact that the use of financial derivatives has been growing again, when markets should have been ‘deleveraging’ on a continuous basis since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, would be good enough reason for such prudence. However, the very extent of such currency swap trade deals promoted by Russia and China suggests that these actions are indicators of a policy of preparation for a basket of currencies to replace the US dollar on a more permanent basis. That would hardly be surprising in view of the reluctance of the USA to agree to reform of the IMF and World Bank.

Petrodollar primacy

It is often forgotten nowadays that the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 established a dual reserve currency system, with the Pound Sterling and the US dollar having fixed rates of exchange against gold. Soon afterwards, the UK devalued Sterling in 1947, partly to retain a competitive edge in global trade while rebuilding its economy. It was also deeply in debt, at a level higher than that incurred in 2008. While the UK could sustain its reserve currency role owing in part to its extensive international trading network with colonies and former colonies, and in part to its relative industrial strength at the end of World War 2, it had by the 1960s lost a lot of its competitiveness owing to the German ‘economic miracle’ and to strong Japanese industrial growth that was funded by the USA. Even France, whose economy had been 25 per cent smaller than that of the UK in 1945, had by 1960 grown to be 25 per cent larger than the UK economy, with more modern infrastructure and massive urbanisation of about 30 per cent of its population. France succeeded in overtaking the UK like this while the UK living standards doubled in the same period. This less well known ‘miracle’ had been achieved by (capitalist) indicative planning, something that is being advocated in Russia at the moment.

Furthermore, Japanese growth was not funded by a ‘proportionate’ rate of capital investment. Instead, the introduction of ‘just in time’ manufacturing meant that less capital was required to achieve a given rate of output. Similarly, the use by firms in northern Italy of ‘flexible specialisation’ meant that they too could compete on international markets with less capital than that required by more conventional UK and US ‘Fordist’ manufacturing methods. By 1967, the UK balance of payments had become so dire that it had to devalue again and close down the Sterling Area (the trading area in which Sterling was the reserve currency).

Yet this economic growth in Europe and Japan was also adversely affecting the USA, despite the fact that it had come out of World War 2 as the world’s biggest and strongest economy. This was particularly true of competition from Japan. When President Nixon ‘closed the gold window’ in 1971, only 4 years after the UK devaluation of Sterling, what this meant was that the US dollar no longer had a fixed exchange rate with the gold, and floated against other currencies. The response of the USA was to reach a deal with Saudi Arabia that the USA would supply sophisticated weapons for Saudi Arabia’s armed forces and otherwise guarantee its security, in return for a guarantee that Saudi Arabia would only sell oil for US dollars. (The UK also managed to secure a long-term arms deal with Saudi Arabia.)

This arrangement created a huge demand for US dollars, and raised the dollar’s international purchasing power. It also created enormous funds of dollars in oil-producing (mainly Middle East) countries that needed to be recycled into ‘investment’ elsewhere. The petrodollar had been created, and the funds were loaned to many developing countries, often whether they needed them or not (John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man).

The resultant indebtedness gave the World Bank and the IMF huge political power to enforce the policies that they favoured. Insofar as petrodollar loans were not used for productive investment, the debt would inevitably grow, and the indebted countries were obliged to follow economic policies favoured by the West, primarily the USA. By the 1980s, the European Commission was fully behind this approach (the Washington Consensus) and enforced it further through agreements such as the Lome Convention with African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries.

The USA also ensured that the terms of trade for food favoured energy intensive production that sustained the demand for oil and for motorised farming equipment. Comparatively low American food prices often drove out producers in developing countries, especially with the addition of the ‘Green Revolution’ that drove many small-scale farmers off the land and into urban unemployment, for example in India. An analogous process can now be seen with AGRA: the ‘Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa’, although this new approach includes promoting genetically modified crops. The implications of all this in terms of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) does not need to be explained to those studying Africa.

A new situation

It is this system that is now under threat from the new alternatives to the Bretton Woods Institutions. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is probably not in a strong enough position to safeguard the status quo. Although this dominance by the Bretton Woods institutions has been bolstered by the intellectual property rights (IPR) and other trade provisions supported by the WTO, and ‘free trade’ has always been a policy pursued by dominant economies since the 19^th century, the fact is that China has been able to achieve export-led growth of its economy in spite of the policies of such institutions. It has even prospered while joining them. Moreover, like Russia, it has joined the very important but little-known Bank of International Settlements. The significance of this will become clearer later.

How has the challenge been mounted?

Over the past 15 years, there have been intermittent claims on the Web that the price of gold is being manipulated. Be that as it may, there does not seem to have been much response in the gold price to the fact that Russia and China have been acquiring gold bullion. In addition a few European countries, including Germany and Belgium have asked for their gold back from the USA or the UK. The USA has delayed returning the gold to Germany. There are also reports that very soon after the coup in Ukraine in February 2014, all the gold bullion in the Ukrainian central bank, said to be worth USD 20 billion, was loaded on to a plane and has since not been accounted for.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the price of gold is indeed being kept artificially low, how does this play out for a country like Russia that is purchasing gold? According to one analysis, this needs to be considered in conjunction with the fact that a high price of oil resulting from the petrodollar arrangement described above keeps the demand for US dollars high. Given that natural gas prices tend to be determined by the price of oil, then Russia can sell both natural gas and oil at a relatively high price for dollars and then purchase gold fairly cheaply. The recent fall in the price of oil could be seen as threatening this market opportunity. In fact, as often happens with other commodities, the immediate response of Russia was to sell more gas at the lower price and to keep on purchasing gold, as well as changing its state budget and allowing the floating Ruble to absorb some of the shock by falling against other currencies, with an inflationary impact on domestic prices.

The longer run effect from 2000 up to 2014 has been that high oil prices have been used by Russia to diversify the economy away from commodity exports, to support the state budget including improved welfare payments, and to buy gold. Over this period the Russian economy has doubled in size and in 2015 is the fifth largest economy in the world. The purchase of gold by Russia (and China) has meant that most other currencies are not backed by something that is almost universally acceptable if confidence in the global financial system collapses. However the Russian and Chinese holdings of gold and the currency swap arrangements made by both Russia and China in the past few years mean that the entire set of countries involved, including BRICS partners and others in Asia and Latin America, no longer depend on dollars for trade to the extent that they once did.

The status quo that is now being undermined

On the other hand, historically, the fact that demand for oil creates a demand for US dollars has meant that the USA has been able to run up unprecedented debts, without suffering the kind of balance of payments crisis that affects other indebted countries (see graphic below). This debt has then been used to play risky financial games for short-run gains in financial markets. That is, the debt has been used as a tradable asset, and such assets have been used for speculative trading gains in financial markets. So-called ‘derivatives’ are a major form of such assets. The fact that so-called ‘investment’ bankers have been sure, even after the financial crisis of 2008, that US taxpayers can be forced to pick up the bill if complex unstable financial derivatives come unstuck has meant that the risky games have resumed, and no fundamental reform of Western financial markets has taken place.

Worse still, not only do taxpayers function as a backstop for such risky speculation, but the failure to keep ‘investment’ banking separate from retail banking has meant that a lot of such speculation is funded using the deposits made by ordinary individuals. Even worse, when one deposits money in a bank, it is not registered as a debt of that bank, but as an asset! So legally, the money no longer belongs to the individual depositor, but to the bank. The banks promise to return the money if requested, but in fact they can repudiate what in common sense terms would be their debt to the depositor. They can simply close their doors and either cease to function as a business or get the taxpayers to bail them out.

For the original illustration see VisualCapitalist.com

Ordinary people are thus losing out in two different ways: as depositors whose money is lost in speculative ventures (as opposed to productive investment) and as taxpayers. Now, with the new innovation known as a ‘bail in’ those depositors that still have money in the bank can have those deposits confiscated by the bank and used to help pay off its debts, as a condition of the bank receiving a bailout that is ultimately funded by taxes. This device was used during the Cyprus banking crisis and is now de facto EU policy for other EU countries. It will probably be used in the USA and elsewhere in future.

So the failure to separate retail banking from ‘investment’ banking, as used to be the case in the USA until 1998, puts individual depositors at risk of losses from the ‘investment’ arms of large banks. Apart from some weak measures in the UK, no real attempt has been made since 2008 to insulate retail banks from this risk. The most likely source of such losses comes from these already mentioned financial instruments known as derivatives. Astonishingly, derivatives actually use existing debt as collateral for taking on other debts, creating a risky ‘pyramid scheme’ type of structure that has the underlying strength of a house of cards. It is systemically unstable. It is precisely this type of risk that BRICS countries would rather not run.

Within developed economies, as we have seen very clearly since 2008, such risks are offloaded on to the general population, in a process rightly described as the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of loss. This creation of ‘debt bondage’ is analogous to the impact of petrodollars in developing countries, and thereby seriously undermines democracy in a manner that favours finance capital. Economic policy is increasingly taken out of the hands of the nation state. Yet the nation state remains the only realistic contender for a properly functioning democracy. As such, this functioning of Western financial systems constitutes a direct attack on democracy, with an increasing level of encroachment on the scope of democratic institutions. As we can see in Europe, at times this amounts to the replacement of a democratically elected government at the diktat of supranational financial institutions. The parallel with Structural Adjustment Programs in developing countries is evident, although in both developing and developed countries, the external imposition of economic policy though SAPs and/or EU Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) need not take so public a form as replacing a prime minister or an entire government.

In this context, one can see that Russia and China have found a means of avoiding reliance on such Western financial institutions and policies, by adopting a different approach at a time when they are not indebted to such institutions. Thus, the purchase of gold by China and Russia, using income from a positive balance of payments, has been part of a new strategy to reduce the reliance on US dollars for international trade. The currency swaps enable other countries with less gold but with tradable goods to ‘join the club’ by reducing their reliance on the US dollar. This has been going on for a few years, but the establishment of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asia Infrastructural Investment Bank (AIIB) has opened up new possibilities, by making it possible for emerging economies to plan both trade and investment without having to comply with the conditionalities of the Bretton Woods Institutions in deciding on their investment and growth priorities.

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS)

The BIS, based in Basle, Switzerland, is usually referred to as the “central bankers’ central bank”. This gives the misleading impression that it is a publicly-owned institution, like the central banks of most nation states. In fact, it is privately owned by influential international banks, and a quick look at its board gives the impression that the City of London has an important if not predominant position. Another major bank that gives the impression that it is state-owned is the Federal Reserve Bank, the central bank of the USA. The actual situation is that the “Fed” as it is known consists of a network of privately owned banks such as the Federal Reserve of New York (or whatever). The Fed issues US dollars in contravention of the Constitution of the United States of America, and has done so since 1913. No US President has attempted to reverse this situation since then, apart from John F. Kennedy.

Now, the board of the BIS meets fairly regularly and issues statements on banking policy, some of which are quite sensible, especially recent statements on the Euro. Most nation states are registered as members, but since it is privately owned this membership looks more like a means of ensuring compliance than an arena in which nation states can seriously contribute to policy making. In other words, private meetings of a privately owned institution that coordinates central bank policy internationally does not look like a beacon of democracy, especially when the central bank of the de facto world reserve currency (the Fed) is also privately owned. Only a few nation states are not members, including Iran and Syria. Is it pure coincidence that these countries are routinely vilified in the Western media?

Military action as a backstop

Given that the petrodollar system and other means described above function to ensure the indebtedness of large sections of the world economy, this means that central banks, including the European Central Bank which administers the affairs of the Euro currency, have huge influence over international economic policy. If indebtedness does not seem to be working to reproduce this situation, then strangely enough countries seem to find themselves targets of military action.

For example, when Saddam Hussein, who had been fully supported by the USA in his war against Iran, decided to sell oil for Euros, Iraq was targeted for invasion, whereas its own earlier invasion of Kuwait had not merited such a response. It had merely been pushed back out of Kuwait, and Coalition troops were then withdrawn from Iraqi territory. No regime change took place. The claimed reason for the later invasion was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but as Frank Chikane has written (Things That Could Not be Said) South Africa had sent a mission of experts to Iraq and prior to the invasion had reported back to the UN, the USA and the UK that Iraq had no such WMD. Nevertheless, regime change took place, which was a war crime under international law.

When Libya decided to establish a series of African financial institutions designed to replace the World Bank and the IMF in Africa, even though it had recently ended its ‘pariah’ status over its alleged role in the Lockerbie plane crash, it was suddenly targeted for regime change on the grounds that it was threatening insurgents in Benghazi. No notice was taken of Libyan claims that such insurgents were members of Al Qaeda. The international response came before any Libyan government troops or artillery were moved towards Benghazi, yet the threat to put down the insurgency was not treated as an empty threat. No other country was even verbally threatened by Libya. Following the regime change that was mounted under the air cover of various NATO countries, there has to my knowledge been no public accounting for what happened to the roughly USD 50 billion of Libyan bank assets that were frozen during the conflict.

It has taken Iran years to get to the point where its meagre supplies of enriched uranium (enough for at most a few nuclear weapons) are probably no longer going to be treated as a program to acquire such weapons. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia’s response hinting that it may well acquire nuclear weapons from Pakistan passed with almost no media comment. Yet the intelligence agencies of both the USA and Israel have repeatedly publicly stated their opinion that Iran is not attempting to acquire nuclear weapons.

In none of these cases am I suggesting that the BIS, the World Bank or the IMF directly ordered military action. Western politicians seem to have a sharp instinctive sense of when the current international financial order is implicitly being threatened, even if the ‘delinquent’ countries do not always seem to be fully aware of the implications of the new policies that they have decided to pursue. In this context, the doctrine of ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) is a convenient ‘justification’ although it has no standing in international law and the consequences for vulnerable populations are invariably worse.

In sharp contrast, although both China and Russia are member states of the BIS, they are economically independent enough not to be subject to the pressures exerted through indebtedness. In addition, they are militarily strong enough to be no pushovers for NATO or any ‘coalition of the willing’. Furthermore, they seem to be too astute to fall for provocations that would draw them into a major war. Consequently, they have so far been able set their new joint agenda without being undermined by the means deployed against other countries since World War 2. Yet war remains an attractive proposition for countries dominated by finance capital. As Major General Smedley Butler (War is a Racket) has pointed out, war is profitable.

Public debt has apparently been a means of control of nation states for at least two hundred years, with wars allegedly financed on both sides by the same banks as a means of generating profits in the short run, and maintaining indebtedness in the longer run. This historical pattern (and its associated present array of supporting institutions) is now being challenged by a loose alliance of countries that seem determined to create alternative institutions. These new institutions are attractive to many countries at a time of widespread failure of the neoliberal orthodoxy and the failure of neocon militarism to resolve the resulting crisis.

Part 2 will look at how this process is playing out in the context of Europe, with the European Commission (EC) and the European Central bank (ECB) apparently attempting to maintain the status quo when the economic situation poses an increasing challenge to current EU institutions. The EU is facing problems in Southern Europe, especially Greece, and has been party to other problems in Ukraine. It is intended that Part 3 will attempt to analyse the implications of all this for Africa.

Gary Littlejohn was Briefings and Debates editor of the Review of African Political Economy from 2010 to 2015. He is the author of Secret Stockpiles: A review of disarmament efforts in Mozambique, Working Paper 21, Small Arms Survey, Geneva, October 2015.

Historic Conference for Socialism in Post-Apartheid South Africa

ROAPE

November 15, 2015

By Ashley Fataar

An historic two-day conference for socialism took place in post-apartheid South Africa on 16 and 17 April, 2015. It drew 150 delegates from ten socialist organisations, two anti-capitalist organisations and eight trade unions from across the country.

The conference was organised by Numsa (National Union of Metal Workers) as part of the declaration at its December 2013 special congress that decided to break from the African National Congress – South African Communist Party (ANC/SACP) alliance and to form a workers organisation to the left of the SACP (see here and here)

In context, the reason that Numsa decided to break from the ANC/SACP alliance is part of the re-alignment of working class and left forces in South Africa as a result of the rising post-apartheid struggles since 1999, the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and the Marikana massacre of 2012. These events also resulted in the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the expulsion of Numsa from the Cosatu (Confederation of SA Trade Unions) trade union federation. But it was the Marikana massacre that was the main trigger that set in conscious motion Numsa’s decision to break away from the ANC/SACP alliance. For many, Marikana marked a break from the politics of national liberation.

Prior to this conference, debates had been taking place amongst socialists who argued that a workers party needed to be formed. The main reason Numsa itself called the conference was to see if such an idea would be workable and how it would be received. It became clear from the debates that the overwhelming consensus was for the creation of a workers party. Numsa needed this consensus to present it to its Central Committee, which agreed with the idea. (see here)

Day One

Day one of the Conference began with Numsa President, Andrew Chirwa, outlining the views of Numsa’s leadership on why it had called the conference and what policies Numsa would be arguing for. Chirwa argued that South Africa needs a socialist transformation. Other attempts that are not socialist will end up in failure.

Numsa’s position is that the working class must form its own vanguard party as this is the working class’s only guarantee to a better future. Numsa is open to having discussions around socialism and that it accepts a plurality of socialist ideas and organisations. Part of this project involved re-positioning the United Front. The United Front is for the implementation of the (nationalist) Freedom Charter and is not anti-neo-liberal. It is not a workers’ party or a socialist formation.

The influence of the SACP’s ideology could be seen in Numsa’s version of getting to socialism. They (Numsa) stated that the immediate task is to get the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) back on track with the Freedom Charter as a basic and also a socialist path. [The NDR is part of the two stage theory which basically argues that the nationalist economy of South Africa has to be developed first before workers are in a position to seize power. At the moment workers are neither sufficiently ideologically clear nor sufficiently organised to achieve socialism.] Numsa further argues that the SACP is no longer socialist or communist; that the Freedom Charter is part of the National Democratic Revolution that must be led by the working class and whose logical conclusion will be socialism.

Delegates from other organisation then gave brief inputs as to what their organisations envision and expect from the process of trying to build a workers party. Below are the inputs from organisations:

Bolshevik Study Circle – We need to also agree on a programme of action. We need unity in action and not only theory.

International Socialist Movement – Stalin aborted socialism in Russia. We need to build a vanguard with theoretical advancement that mobilises the working class. Only an organisation based on Leninism and the Bolshevik approach can smash capitalism. We salute Numsa for this debate and the battle for ideas that are needed. We need to form a working class party with clear socialist ideology and workers must be given the theory. Socialism must come from below, from workers schooled in the ideas of revolutionary Marxism. We can only participate in elections in an upturn in the struggle.

Pan Africanist Congress – Without land we can’t talk of freedom. We need to correct the theft of our land.

Azania People’s Organisation – The struggle has labels and we forget the struggles on the ground. The struggle to liberate did not happen with 1994. It is the same with Zimbabwe. We want to engage but not get married to the Movement for Socialism.

Socialist Party of Azania – We need to build a United Front. The IMF and World Bank have caused misery and poverty for the working class. We must be independent of the state and global institutions.

Revolutionary Marxist Group – We have been passing through a pre-revolutionary period for a number of years. Capitalism is rotting. The working class needs the United Front which must emerge and not be launched. People will come into struggle because of poverty and not who calls them. We need campaigns for service delivery. Socialism is not common to everyone.

Keep Left – We need to build our strengths again. Xenophobia is racism. We must recognise that it is not afrophobia as Pakistanis are also attacked. We must not be opportunist in our response to xenophobia like the Economic Freedom Fighters. Xenophobia is the legacy of nationalism. Changing the world is complex. Numsa is walking away from Stalinism and that is historic in South Africa. This embryonic movement needs to break the Stalinist legacy. We are far left not ultra-left. Egypt shows the danger of not building the alternative.

Socialist Group – We have clashed before and we will continue to clash in the future. We need a movement that allows that. We agree with lots that has been said. That is why we are here. Working class struggle unbanned the SACP, but now the SACP attacks workers struggle. We support the transitional programme but not the two stage theory as we are at stage forty-eight. There is ideological uncertainty in the working class. The working class cannot move forward until it takes the struggle into its own hands. We must have a workers charter. We need to get rid of the Labour Relations Act that ties the hands of workers. Our constitution says that those who stole and continue to steal the wealth can keep it. We must break those laws. If workers everywhere did what the Marikana workers did, there would be revolution. The ANC was never a party of socialism. Many union (leaderships), like the National Union of Mineworkers, stand with the bosses. The ANC tries to use labour to prop up capital. We must not separate the vanguard from the rest of the class. Unless a mass revolutionary working class party arises to take the lead then the struggle of the working class will fold to the fascists and xenophobia. We have a problem with the NDR and the Freedom Charter. The struggle to free the working class and for socialism are linked. We need a workers party with a socialist programme.

Workers and Socialist Party – Theoretical debates are not trivial. The ANC was never a party of socialism. Many union leaders stand with the bosses. The ANC uses labour to prop up capital. We must not separate the vanguard from the rest of the working class. Unless a mass workers party arises to take the lead then the struggle of the working class will fold to fascists and xenophobia. We have a problem with the NDR and the Freedom Charter. The struggle to free the working class and society are linked. We need a mass workers party with a socialist programme.

Speakers from the floor were then asked to speak. The points that were touched on include:

There are those from Stalinist backgrounds and those from Trotskyist backgrounds. We won’t all find a common ideology. But theory and practise go hand-in-hand. Theory only is useless. Practise only is blind. The final judge is history and the working class. We must go past being sects into a movement of the masses for socialism.

There is an urgency regarding this project as there is a desperation for a clear political organisation and expression. In the absence of an alternative then frustration will erupt. We must actively orientate to struggles. What kind of support has the UF given to various struggles? What kind of party will we have if we are not organically linked to the working class struggles?

Numsa was kicked out of Cosatu. Numsa set up a UF and is now setting up a workers party. This is enough to break anyone’s back. In future the working class must be the agent of change. It must be central and lead with its organisations.

We must not rush this process. Numsa and the other unions must take this process to their members or else we will have a shell. We must bring theory to the workers. This process will take time.

Day 2

On day two, delegates broke up into three separate groups. The purpose was to look at the situation in South Africa and to compare it to situations outside South Africa. One group focused on the character of the South African situation, another focused on the African situation and the last focused on the global situation. The last two did so in relation to South Africa. The debates that were raised are as follows:

There is a bankruptcy of capitalism which is the cause of the problems of the working class. The ANC’s neo-liberal policies are facilitating the crisis of the working class. Xenophobia has to be understood in class terms. It is a direct product of capitalism.

Capitalism is anarchical. They want to impoverish workers and see how far they can go before there is a backlash. Ordinary workers must put themselves in the struggle. Authoritarian examples of Gaddafi, Mugabe, etc. are not good examples for socialism. We must be internationalist and build on an African internationalism. Capitalism is the enemy and this is what must unite us. What opened up South Africa to neo-liberalism? Capitalism gives rise to patriarchy and tribalism.

We need a revolutionary socialist programme to unite the working class. We need pluralism on the basis of democratic centralism. At the end of the day the people will answer and decide on the mass workers party. Fighting your own ruling class at home is the internationalist aspect of struggles. Many national liberation liberation movements painted themselves red. They never went to stage two. The Bolsheviks are the only party that immediately “handed” the land over to the peasants. Socialist organisations must gather socialists and push socialist ideology. People won’t fight over demands that we give them but they will decide on what to fight for.

International socialism can contribute immensely to local struggles through learning from experiences elsewhere. If we don’t learn then we face failure. The mass workers party is not mutually exclusive to the vanguard party. Theory is important. Views must be tested in practise. We need advanced cadres in the party. We must come out with a transitional programme. Ultimately workers must seize power but not from nothing. The transitional programme and the revolutionary programme are formulaic and dogmatic. It has never worked. We need to develop a programme around wages, land, houses, water, etc. We can do accepting the primacy of struggles on the ground. We must draw up this programme urgently.

Neo-liberal finance and monopoly capital have had negative effects: there are increased and aggressive geo-political and military alliances with imperialism; the BRICS block (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have a sub-imperialist role and stand for the advancement of capital interests; climate change will intensify the transmission of ecological crisis.

There is a need for a working class formation by the class and in the class – an organ of the class. Should it be a vanguard party or a workers’ party? What should be the program – internationalism needs to be central and not an added extra. Countries outside South Africa provided assistance to South African comrades.

Are our class forces ready? Is this the correct time? What are the stumbling blocks to build a strong working class organ? The key is social distance. Within left forces we need to recognise that most in the middle class distinguish themselves from the working class. This undermines one’s own socialism. What are the implications of the divide between formal and informal, men and women, rural and urban. Trade Unions are too bureaucratic and need to open up. Dominance of imperialist and capitalist consciousness – ruling class and its consciousness remain dominant in the continent. There have not been clear and radical programmes to advance socialism. Social and working class forces have been substituted by the state and consciousness has been pushed back.

We need to come up with our own institutions to replace the current state. We have to take over political power to implement a socialist project. We need to build a front of worker and socialist formations with a minimum political program that mobilises the working class. This will need a leadership and constitute what may be called a Socialist Revolutionary Council that will co-ordinate left initiatives.

There is no real movement in SA that has a sustained impact especially against capitalism. We must build a movement to have a sustained impact. Transitional demands are the only way to change people’s consciousness. What are these tasks? Programmes by themselves don’t become material things unless we can relate to the ordinary person. We need to have a sense of where the working class is today. Numsa has missed a number of fights within Cosatu. The next period (18 months) needs to be a period of preparation.

The blunder of the SACP was to go Stalinist. The organ of the working class should draw various views of the working class. There is a great fear of the vanguard as it means a particular elite will run the party. You can have a party of professional revolutionaries based in the working class that is accountable and imposes its hegemony. Its agenda and programme must be the overthrow of capitalism. We are not fixated on one position but we are united.

Struggles of youth and women are not marginal. Patriarchy has remained throughout the various struggles in Africa. We have ignored the role of religion. Foreign debt trap has opened up Africa to foreign-imposed programs. African governments have been too responsive to the demands of the international community at the expense of local needs. We need to nationalise in order to socialise the means of production. We need to promote production and trade that provides for the needs of the working class.

After two days of sometimes tense debate, it is clear that the debate as to the precise kind of workers organisation, what it stands for, how it relates to other forces, and the vision of socialism itself, is far from over. These debates will need to be continued.

But socialists must be cautious. Not everyone in the labour movement, organised or not, employed or not, is familiar with the arguments raised here. In order to make sense to the ordinary mass of rank-and-file workers means socialists will need to begin patiently making these arguments with workers.

Ashley Fataar is a leading member of the Democratic Left Front in Cape Town and he writes for websites and newspapers around the world.

Popular Protest & Social Movements – Part 1

ROAPE

September 30, 2015

By David Seddon

Project

This project is one several being hosted by the ROAPE website. It is coordinated by David Seddon, with the support of Leo Zeilig and Peter Dwyer. But the project anticipates and invites the active involvement of others interested in the topic and we can discuss the ways in which others may make a valuable contribution as the project evolves.

The aim of the project is to provide a constantly updated account (and archive) and analysis of instances of popular protest and examples of social movements across the African continent with a view to identifying patterns and trends.

In this, the first issue of the project, we shall provide an overview of the global context of struggles in Africa to ensure that there can be no African exceptionalism, even if we recognise the distinctive history of imperialism and capitalist development in Africa and the distinctive forms that popular protest, social movements and class struggle take in Africa. In subsequent issues we shall focus more closely and in detail on the African experience, as exemplified by particular instances of popular protest and class struggle, and by the emergence and development of social movements in Africa.

An era of crises?

In September 2014, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon declared at the opening of the UN General Assembly, “we are living in an era of unprecedented level of crises”. What did he mean, and to what ‘era’ was he referring?

Was he referring to the global economic crisis that began in 2007-08 and has lasted until now, with recession in many countries and a significant slowing down of growth in others? Was he referring to the on-going and arguably deepening set of conflicts associated with the aftermath of foreign intervention and the emergence of new radical Islamist movements across North Africa and the Middle East in particular, from 2001 onwards? Was he referring to the growing militarisation of Russia, its interventions in the Crimea and Ukraine in 2014-15, and the ongoing ‘civil war’ inside Ukraine? Or perhaps he was commenting on the rapid growth over the last two decades of international migration and the increased numbers of desperate migrants fleeing from conflict, famine and general insecurity, only to wash up on the shores of the Mediterranean or of countries in south east Asia, that has become the latest identified major crisis, in 2015?

It is less likely that he was referring to the upsurge in popular protest against economic reform, austerity and the authoritarian or pseudo-democratic regimes that have adopted these policies in recent years, in many parts of the world (including the so-called developed countries of the West, and of course Africa) that some on the left have identified in recent years.

Of course, all of these five examples in different ways represent major current crises in the global political economy, but it is the first four identified above that have received most attention, the fifth significantly less so. This is, in large part, because in their analyses of political crises, the Western media very largely focus on what appear to be major threats associated with international and regional security issues, while in the case of economic crises, most commentators focus on the crisis of capital, whereas those concentrating on the crisis of labour – the impact of capitalist crisis on the urban poor and working classes – are relatively few and far between in the mainstream media (or academia for that matter) – dominated as they are by the interests of capital and of governments that are either obliged or, in many cases, choose to represent those interests rather than those of the mass of their citizens.

Even when the impact on ordinary people of these manifold political-economic ‘crises’ is considered, it is all too often from a perspective that identifies them either as the unwitting and unwilling victims of events, powerless in the face of powerful economic forces and newly emergent political tendencies to be addressed largely through various forms of humanitarian intervention, or else as a terrible existential threat, when identified with Islamist terrorism or hordes of unwanted migrants. Even in the fraught case of the EU and one if its member states, Greece, the ordinary Greek people and their elected government tend to be either seen as victims in the struggle between ‘the powers that be’ in the euro-zone and the ‘left-wing’ government of SYRIZA, or as lazy, tax-avoiding, ouzo-swilling, bouzouki-playing primitives.

It is rarely acknowledged that these ordinary people, whether in their own countries or travelling abroad as migrants, are active players in the political-economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism, even if it is indeed the case that they generally are less able to influence world events than are the bankers and financiers, industrialists, merchants and traders, and the governments, armed forces and international agencies of various kinds.

But there is a growing body of writing on the global political economy that recognises the continuing importance of the class struggle, and particularly of the various forms of direct action from below that stem from the active resistance and opposition of ordinary people to the dominant forces of global capitalism and its national manifestations as well as to the governments of various guises that preside over and actively promote growing inequality, imposing austerity and other measures to control and regulate labour and the working classes as a whole.

Global Dissent?

In the last couple of years, some analysts have identified a ‘new wave’ of global protest. In the March-April 2013 issue of Amandla, for example, Esther Vivas wrote a piece on popular protest entitled ‘From the World Social Forum to the Arab Revolts’, in which she drew attention to the significance of the fact that Tunisia was hosting the World Social Forum at the time of publication: ‘Tunisia, cradle of the revolts in the Arab world, hosts from today [26 March] and until Saturday the World Social Forum (WSF), the most important international meeting of social movements and organizations. And this is not by chance. The promoters of the WSF chose this country in reference to the Arab Spring. The latter has not only given rise to new movements of opposition in North Africa and the Middle East, but has also ‘contaminated’ the south of Europe, in particular with the movement of the ‘indignant’ in the Spanish State, as well as the Occupy movement in the United States’.

Significantly, she identified this phenomenon as ‘a new cycle of protest which has emerged on an international scale, determined by a systemic crisis and debt and austerity policies, in particular in the countries of the periphery of the European Union subjected to harsh measures of adjustment’. Is her idea of a ‘new cycle of protest’ emerging on an international scale, starting with the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 and continuing up to 2013, convincing – and at least congruent with Ban Ki Moon’s notion of an ‘era of crises’? Our reply would be – yes, and no.

Yes, because there can be little doubt that the period of the global recession of 2008-2015 has coincided with a wave of popular protest across the world; no, because this is only the latest of a series of waves of global popular protest that can be identified since the last major recession of the 1970s and early 1980s when numerous countries in the Third World (and in the Second World also) were obliged to undertake economic reforms and ‘structural adjustment’ in the initial stages of what has come to be termed ‘ globalization’[1]. Some, furthermore, see this most recent post-independence series of waves of global protest in a longer historical perspective, going all the way back to 1848, and would regard them as part of the ‘long waves’ of the anti-capitalist movement.

For example, The Economist – that doyen of neo-liberal thinking – carried on the front cover of its 29 June – 5 July 2013 issue, under a banner headline: ‘The March of Protest’, a picture of four figures, the first (a woman bearing aloft the flag of France) representing 1848 in Europe, the second (dressed as a hippie and carrying flowers in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other) representing 1968 in the US and Europe, the third (a man in worker’s clothes) with a spanner in one hand and a candle the other) representing 1989 in Eastern Europe, and finally, a woman (dressed in modern clothes and carrying a Starbucks coffee container in one hand and holding aloft a mobile phone in the other) representing 2013 ‘everywhere’. Interestingly, in light of its own detailed coverage of the phenomenon throughout 2011 and 2012, the Economist of June-July 2013 fails to illustrate the ‘Arab Spring’. There is no figure in Arab dress representing the Arab world in 2011, significant though that was as an example of a concerted and arguably coordinated movement of popular protest.

The lead article in The Economist points out that ‘these protests have many different origins. In Brazil people rose up against bus fares, in Turkey against a building project. Indonesians have rejected higher fuel prices, Bulgarians the government’s cronyism. In the euro zone they march against austerity, and the Arab spring has become a perma-protest against pretty much everything. Each angry demonstration is angry in its own way. Yet just as in 1848, 1968 and 1989, when people also found a collective voice, the demonstrators have much in common’. It notes that ‘over the past few weeks, in one country after another, protesters have risen up with bewildering speed. They have been more active in democracies than dictatorships. They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge’.

‘Nobody can know how 2013 will change the world—if at all’, concludes the Economist. ‘In 1989, the Soviet empire teetered and fell. But Marx’s belief that 1848 was the first wave of a proletarian revolution was confounded by decades of flourishing capitalism and 1968, which felt so pleasurably radical at the time, did more to change sex than politics. Even now, though, the inchoate significance of 2013 is discernible. And for politicians who want to peddle the same old stuff, the news is not good’. It remarks, tellingly, that, while popular protest might be uncomfortable and even threatening for democracies, ‘democrats may envy the ability of dictators to shut down demonstrations’.

It comments that ‘China has succeeded in preventing its many local protests from cohering into a national movement. Saudi Arabia has bribed its dissidents to be quiet; Russia has bullied them with the threats of fines and prison. But in the long run, the autocrats may pay a higher price. Using force to drive people off the streets can weaken governments fatally, as Sultan Erdogan may yet find; and as the Arab governments discovered two years ago, dictatorships lack the institutions through which to channel protesters’ anger. As they watch democracies struggle in 2013, the leaders in Beijing, Moscow and Riyadh should be feeling uncomfortable’.

Interestingly, given the analysis developed by the Economist in its June-July 2013 issue, the London Review of Books carried an article by Slavoj Zizek in July 2013, entitled ‘Trouble in Paradise’, which begins by observing that ‘in his early writings, Marx described the German situation as one in which the only answer to particular problems was the universal solution: global revolution. This is a succinct expression of the difference between a reformist and a revolutionary period: in a reformist period, global revolution remains a dream which, if it does anything, merely lends weight to attempts to change things locally; in a revolutionary period, it becomes clear that nothing will improve without radical global change. In this purely formal sense, 1990 was a revolutionary year: it was plain that partial reforms of the Communist states would not do the job and that a total break was needed to resolve even such everyday problems as making sure there was enough for people to eat’.

Zizek then asks: ‘where do we stand today with respect to this difference? Are the problems and protests of the last few years signs of an approaching global crisis, or are they just minor obstacles that can be dealt with by means of local interventions?’ He suggests that ‘the most remarkable thing about the eruptions is that they are taking place not only, or even primarily, at the weak points in the system, but in places which were until now perceived as success stories. We know why people are protesting in Greece or Spain; but why is there trouble in such prosperous or fast-developing countries as Turkey, Sweden or Brazil?’

His question about the significance of widespread popular protest in the emerging or rapidly developing countries of what was previously the Third World, as well as in the arguably struggling if not failing ‘developed’ countries of Europe, is very pertinent. For it encourages us to consider the relationship between capitalist development on a world scale (globalisation) and the growth of systematic and widespread popular protest. As a RoAPE project, it is appropriate to turn our attention particularly to Africa, which many have argued is going through an unprecedented phase of capitalist development – as part of the uneven and combined development of capitalism on a world scale in the 21^st century – which is sometimes characterised as ‘Africa Rising’.

Africa Rising?

In Amandla no 37/38 2014 and in International Viewpoint online in December 2014, Firoze Manji asked ‘Is Africa Rising?’ He drew attention to the new conventional wisdom that emphasised the importance of GDP growth rates across Africa as a whole of 5 to 6 per cent as year, particularly in the years before the global recession. But he comments on the heavy reliance of Africa on growth and income from the extractive industries, pointing out that natural resource extraction and associated state expenditure account for more than 30 per cent of Africa’s GDP growth since 2000. The primary contributors to the growth in GDP have been a small number of the oil and gas exporters (Algeria, Angola, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria), which have the highest GDP on the continent, but are also the least diversified economies.

Manji argues that ‘international capital sees the possibilities of major profits to be gained from oil, natural gas, minerals, land grabbing and the like. Transnational corporations court African governments to implement policies that include the massive privatisation of state-owned enterprises, low or no taxation of corporate profits and opening markets to a flood of manufactured commodities. All of these measures have had a devastating impact on the ability of local manufacturing to survive. It is hardly surprising that, according to a McKinsey report, the “annual flow of foreign direct investment into Africa increased from $9 billion in 2000 to $62 billion in 2008 – relative to GDP, almost as large as the flow into China”. Most of this investment has been into the extractive industries’.

So how has Africa benefitted from this? According to Carlos Lopes, the executive secretary of UNECA, “average net profits for the top 40 mining companies grew by 156 per cent in 2010 whereas the take for governments grew by only 60 per cent, most of which was accounted for by Australia and Canada.” He remarks that the profit made by the same set of mining companies in 2010 was $110 billion, which was equivalent to the merchandise exports of all African LDCs in the same year. In reality, the GDP growth rates on which the proponents of the idea of ‘Africa Rising’ rely disguises the fact that across the continent there has been a decline in the manufacturing sectors, caused primarily by the neo-liberal policies that opened up the economies to manufactured goods from the more developed industrial capitalist countries.

As pointed out by Rick Rowden in his analysis of the 2011 UNCTAD report, the share of manufacturing value added (MVA) in Africa’s GDP ‘fell from 12.8 per cent in 2000 to 10.5 per cent in 2008’, while in developing Asia it rose from 22 per cent to 35 per cent over the same period: ‘There has also been a decline in the importance of manufacturing in Africa’s exports, with the share of manufactures in Africa’s total exports having fallen from 43 per cent in 2000 to 39 per cent in 2008. In terms of manufacturing growth, while most have stagnated, 23 African countries had negative MVA per capita growth during the period 1990 – 2010, and only five countries achieved an MVA per capita growth above 4 per cent’. The trend of the declining contribution of manufacturing is confirmed once again by the 2014 UNCTAD report on LDCs.

So while ‘Africa Rising’ means a one-dimensional focus on rising GDP and massive profits accrued by transnational corporations, the reality is that in Africa, although governments and national capital may benefit to some extent, the major features of the political economy are: the rape of largely non-renewable resources, land grabs and rising profits for foreign companies, and rising prices of basic goods, including food, increasing landlessness, growing urban poverty and inequality and the effective pauperisation of the mass of the people, including the so-called ‘middle classes’, many of whom also struggle to survive.

Africa Uprising?

In this context, it is highly significant that as Manji goes on to remark, ‘there is another aspect of the idea of ‘Africa Rising’ that gives us hope in the future and potential for self-determination of the people of the continent needs to be given greater attention: that is, risings of people across the continent, which I have highlighted elsewhere’[2]. ‘In addition to the outbreak of revolutionary situations in Tunisia and Egypt that resulted in the ousting of Ben Ali and Mubarak (respectively), there have been popular uprisings in Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Djibouti, Gabon, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Somalia, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Togo, Uganda, Western Sahara, Zimbabwe’.

Other commentators, like Ernest Harsch, have also written about the ‘new wave’ of protest as ‘an African perennial [3]. His article starts with references to popular protest in Uganda and Nigeria and then goes on to observe that ‘true revolutions may be few and far between. But that does not mean that Africans have been passive in the face of the serious difficulties they face. While Africa’s elites have many ways to influence policy—bankrolling favorite candidates and parties, evading unwelcome taxes and regulations, subverting state institutions through corruption and bribery—the poor must often resort to one of the few sources of power available to them: public protest’.

He observes that ‘in most African countries, accurate and accessible data on protest activities are scarce. Researchers usually are obliged to rely on media reports, which by their nature are partial, inconsistent, and vary greatly by country (depending on the extent of press freedoms and the capacity of the given media). Such sources, despite their limitations, can nevertheless be quite illuminating. Simple searches on just a few keywords (“protest,” “strike,” “riot”) on the website allAfrica.com, for example, found well over 3,000 reports of protest events in Africa during the first seven months of 2013 alone—even excluding the exceptional cases of Egypt and Tunisia’.

Beyond the sheer numbers of reports, their geographical breadth is notable. ‘With only a half dozen or so exceptions’, Harsch suggests, in 2013, ‘every African country has experienced some form of public protest, even in highly repressive states where demonstrators readily face violent police or military reactions (such as Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Gambia, Sudan, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe)’…. ‘Once sporadic occurrences, protests have become more common in Africa in recent years. Except in a few countries, it may still be premature to talk of the emergence of African ‘movement societies’; but it is nevertheless evident that active dissent is no longer stigmatized—or so easily repressed—and that public tolerance for disruptive protest has been spreading’.

‘As Firoze Manji observes (writing at the very end of 2014), ‘most recently, uprisings in Burkina Faso have led to the deposing of Blaise Campaore, the murderer of the Burkinabé revolutionary, Thomas Sankara’. Each of these uprisings, Manji suggests, has been fuelled by decades of dispossessions and pauperisation that accompanied the latest phase of capitalism, popularly referred to as ‘neo-liberalism’, which represents a stage in the longer process of ‘globalisation’ (the development of capitalism on a world scale). They were fuelled also by reversals of the gains of independence that established universal education, access to health care, social welfare, water, power and a wide range of social infrastructure. In other words, he identifies this ‘wave’ of popular protest as a distinct and relatively recent phenomenon.

He was in no position, however, given that he was writing at the end of December 2014, to comment that the popular protest movement in Burkina Faso continued into 2015. The ‘wave’, however, continues to roll, as the RoAPE project reveals the similarities and the links between three particular recent instances of popular protest and class struggle.

Three Cases of Popular Protest: 2014-2015

Burkina Faso

The Burkinabè uprising was a series of demonstrations and riots in Burkina Faso in October 2014 that quickly spread to many other towns across the country. They began in response to attempts to change the constitution to allow President Blaise Compaoré to run again, and extend his 27 years in office. Following a tumultuous day on 30 October, which involved protestors burning the National Assembly and other government buildings as well as the ruling Congress for Democracy and Progress party’s headquarters, and a number of deaths, Compaoré dissolved the government and declared a state of emergency before eventually fleeing to Ivory Coast with the support of President Alassane Ouattara [4].

At the beginning of November 2014, army chief, Gen Honore Traore, declared that he had taken over, but it was not clear that he had the backing of all the military. Indeed, shortly afterwards an interim government was announced, with President Michel Kafando and Prime Minister Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Zida taking on the key ministries of foreign affairs and defence respectively. Of the 26 posts available, the army claimed six, including mines, communications and the interior ministry. Other members were drawn from civil society groups and a medley of political parties. A brief period of army rule ensued, led by Zida, before he bowed to pressure from the African Union to cede power to a civilian president, who was to remain in charge until elections in 2015. At the beginning of February, however, thousands of people took to the streets to call for the scrapping of the presidential guard, following the ousting of Blaise Compaore in October.

During last year’s protests, which left at least 24 people dead and more than 600 injured, Amnesty International accused the elite corps of ‘excessive and lethal’ use of force. The guard was disbanded, but the protest movement, which had brought together a number of different elements of civil society, notably young people, and involved a number of non-governmental organisations, including Le Balai Citoyen (The Citizen’s Broom), remained vigilant.

The Citizen’s Broom is a political grassroots movement in Burkina Faso, which was part of the opposition against President Blaise Compaoré. The movement is part of the Sankarist political tradition, appealing to the legacy and ideals of Captain Thomas Sankara, a radical left-wing revolutionary who ruled the country from 1983 until his death in 1987, killed during a coup orchestrated by his successor Compaoré. Co-founder Sams’K Le Jah received his political education in the Pioneers of the Revolution, the youth movement of Sankara’s Democratic and Popular Revolution. The movement is so named both in reference to ‘sweeping out’ perceived political corruption, and also to the regular street-cleaning exercises – initiated by Thomas Sankara – in which citizens would pick up brooms and clean their neighbourhoods, both an act of community development and a metaphor for societal self-sufficiency. Members carry brooms during protests as a symbol of this.

It was co-founded by two musicians, reggae artist Sams’K Le Jah and rapper Serge Bambara (“Smockey”) in the summer of 2013. They organized several protests in early 2014, for example hosting a joint rally with the newly formed Movement of People for Progress, filling a 35,000-capacity sports stadium to its rafters. When the October 2014 Burkinabé uprising broke out the group became a prominent part of the protests, its activists gaining note due to their presence on the streets. President Compaoré was forced to resign and flee the country on 31 October, after 27 years of rule. The Citizen’s Broom, which organised a symbolic sweeping of Ouagadougou‘s streets following Compaoré’s departure, was reported to be supportive of Zida’s transitional government. But its leaders called for protesters to “remain vigilant and on high alert, to not let anyone steal the victory of the sovereign people.

“We encouraged young people to rise and protest,” says Dramane Zinaba, national co-ordinator of the Citizen’s Broom, which was one of the movements at the forefront of the protests last autumn. “Now we want to keep them mobilised. They need to get their weapon, their voter’s card, to bring real change in 2015.” The movement is currently campaigning to encourage young people to enrol on electoral lists before the elections which are now scheduled not to take place until October 2015.

Burundi

Manji was also not in a position to comment on the mass protests that broke out in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, when President Pierre Nkurunziza announced in April 2015, in an initiative not too dissimilar to that of Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso, that he would run for a third term in the June elections. The demonstrations continued over a period of three weeks until 13 May, when a military coup took place, while Nkurunziza was out of the country. Forces loyal to the President overturned the coup the next day, but the situation remained tense and uncertain throughout the rest of May and by the third week of the month the UN estimated some 120,000 people had fled from Burundi seeking refuge elsewhere, mainly in Tanzania.

On 18 May 2015, hundreds of protesters took to the streets across the capital once again, despite a ban and official warnings against taking part in demonstrations after the failed coup the previous week. ‘Our politics are different’, protesters chanted in the local Kirundi language, as some stomped in unison, clapped, blew whistles, raised hands and carried branches. ‘Our politics are different because we are against corruption’, said one protestor, Arakata Bonfils, age 32, according to an article by Ismail Kishkush in The Economist online (18 May 2015), ‘The president has become a king’.

During the demonstrations, many shops in the capital, Bujumbura, remained closed, public buses were scarce and Army patrols roamed through town. In areas where protests were expected, soldiers were heavily armed. Ismail Kushkush reported that ‘In the working-class neighborhood of Musaga, demonstrators started to gather in the midmorning, carrying banners that read, ‘No to a third term’ and ‘No war’ in French. A soldier fired warning shots that dispersed the crowd, at least for a few moments. “We are not attacking; why are they shooting?” said Nahimana Jean-Claude, age 35, who ran into an alley. Protesters slowly trickled back, burning tires, setting up a roadblock of stones, branches and trash, chanting and singing choir songs and the national anthem’.

‘As one group of soldiers tried to manage the protest, another unit without numbers on their uniforms walked up from behind, cocking their guns and igniting a quarrel. That led the first group to plead with them to back off. “If you shoot, I will shoot,” one soldier said to another in Kirundi’. The army had largely been seen as neutral throughout the crisis. But the failed coup and divisions among its ranks have led to questions about its future role. “There have been divisions for several years, with the army much more divided than the police,” said Carina Tertsakian of Human Rights Watch. “Some, including senior officers, have become increasingly impatient and disillusioned with President Nkurunziza.”

President Nkurunziza warned the opposition that they were endangering the country, weakening his government ‘at a time when there was a growing threat from Al Shabab, the Somali Islamist extremist group’. “We are not worried about Al-Shabab,” said Patrick Ndumwimana, a student protestor, “We are worried about the Imbonerakure.” The Imbonerakure are members of the youth wing of the governing party and have been accused of intimidating, threatening and even killing opponents.

On 2 June 2015, Burundi opposition leaders called for fresh protests and vowed to keep up the rallies against Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term. But the security forces were deployed and a week or so later, on 11 June 2015, Pierre Nkurikiye, deputy spokesman for the security ministry and the police declared that ‘There are no more demonstrations in Bujumbura or inside the country’, adding that the media were to blame for the remaining pockets of protests. “It is a movement of some journalists — especially those sent by the international media — who… organise groups of people in remote areas, away from police, and ask them to sing, to exhibit placards.”

Civil society leader, Pacifique Nininahazwe, called the claims the protests had ended ‘a joke’. “If there are no more demonstrations, why is it the police fire every morning and every night in Bujumbura’s neighbourhoods? Why do we bury people every day killed by the police?” he asked. In a stronger statement, the government claims were ‘pure lies’ said opposition leader, Frederic Bamvuginyumvira, and expressed concern that little more than two weeks remained before parliamentary elections were to be held. Key opposition parties boycotted the parliamentary elections that took place on 29 June 2015.

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

In the middle of January 2015, university students were at the forefront of demonstrations in Kinshasa, as they protested against an attempt by President Joseph Kabila to introduce a draft law that would enable him to extend his presidency beyond his current mandate, which ends in 2016. The law was adopted on 17 January 2015 by the Congolese National Assembly. After several days of violence, in Kinshasa and other towns, at least 42 people had been killed, according to the International Federation of Human Rights (although the government gave an estimate of five). The army and the police arrested dozens of protestors as they hurled rocks at state buildings, public buses and even passing cars. In Brussels, where he was recovering from illness, Etienne Tshisekedi, the veteran leader of the main opposition party, the UDPS, urged the Congolese people to force ‘a dying regime’ from power.

On 23 January 2015, the International Crisis Group commented that ‘this surge of protest is the latest and, so far, most violent confrontation between the government and the opposition since the deeply flawed November 2011 elections and is a clear demonstration of the continuing crisis of legitimacy that faces Kabila’s presidency. While regional and international actors have largely focused on crises in the east, there has been little effort to encourage the national government and opposition to create a more consensual political environment. The Senate decision proves that there is no consensus even among the majority group that supports the president’. It also remarked that ‘the reaction of the Kabila government to the protests has been heavy-handed, involving the deployment of riot police and troops, including the Republican Guard. Demonstrators were violently repressed and there are reports of several casualties. Several opposition leaders have been arrested or had their freedom of movement limited. From 20 January, the government has blocked or limited SMS and internet access’.

Protesters stand next to tyres set on fire on January 20, 2015, in Kinshasa, during a protest against moves to allow Democratic Republic of Congo’s president to extend his hold on power ©Papy Mulongo (AFP/File)

At the end of January AFP reported that ‘a call by the Congolese opposition for peaceful demonstrations to oust President Joseph Kabila went unheeded Monday as authorities maintained a crippling block on text messages and social networks used to rally demonstrators. Only about 50 people gathered at the headquarters of veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi’s Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UPDS) in the capital Kinshasa, despite the party calling for mass protests. The small crowd dispersed shortly before midday (1100 GMT) when several jeeploads of police arrived at the scene after authorities warned no opposition demonstrations would be permitted’.

On 12 February 2015, election officials announced that presidential elections would be held in November, thereby satisfying a key demand of the opposition. Violent protests had broken out the previous month over fears that President Joseph Kabila was trying to delay polls. President Kabila is currently constitutionally barred from contesting the poll; but he has not officially declared his intentions for the election, although the government denies he is deliberately seeking to extend his presidency and has dropped plans for a controversial census to be held before elections. The United States has repeatedly urged Kabila to respect term limits and set a date for the election.

A month later, on 18 March 2015, it was reported that the government had ordered the immediate expulsion of four foreign pro-democracy activists detained over the weekend during and criticized the United States for supporting the event. Government spokesman, Lambert Mende, said the foreign activists including a Burkinabe and three Senegalese activists were part of a “subversive movement inspired from abroad.” Authorities had found military uniforms in their luggage but Congo has dropped a criminal investigation into them, he added. The foreign activists were said to have organized protests in their home countries supporting presidential term limits ahead of elections. The Burkinabe activist, significantly, was a member of the grassroots political group ‘Balai Citoyen’ (The Citizen’s Broom), which played a leading role in toppling long-term President Blaise Compaore as he – like President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi and President Kabila of the DRC – sought to extend his mandate.

The four detainees were among some 40 activists, musicians and journalists arrested in the capital. A US diplomat was also briefly detained. Mende said a “black hand” had been active in Congolese politics this year and singled out the role of the U.S. embassy, which has acknowledged partially sponsoring Sunday’s news conference. ‘The U.S. embassy does not have the status to organize political events in Democratic Republic of Congo’, Mende said. The US embassy declined to give an immediate response to this comment, although it has previously said that representatives at the event were respected and non-partisan. One Congolese journalist in Kinshasa was released shortly after his arrest but the remainder of the local activists remained in custody. Mende said their cases would be ‘closed very soon’. In the eastern city of Goma, about a dozen youth activists were released after having been detained earlier in the day by intelligence agents while protesting the Kinshasa arrests.

Comparisons and Cross-Country Cooperation

These three instances of popular protest resemble each other in a number of important respects. In all cases the trigger for the demonstrations was an attempt by the President of the county concerned to extend his period of office beyond the limited allowed by the Constitution. This tendency to wish to consolidate and extend power is not, of course, confined to these three cases – there are several other examples in other parts of Africa which we intend also to consider in future issues – but it is significant that direct action and popular protest appears to be an increasingly common response in countries where efforts by the officially recognised opposition parties in these pseudo-democracies to prevent a further consolidation of power in the hands of a very few prove ineffective.

It is also clear that there has been at least some success in developing linkages between the social movements promoting direct action against illegitimate attempts by existing pseudo-democratic regimes to consolidate power and undermine democracy – the presence of Le Balai Citoyen – ‘The Citizen’s Broom’ – from Burkina Faso in the DRC, is a case in point.

Finale

Space does not allow for a more protracted consideration, in this issue, of the larger patterns and trends of ‘popular protest, social movements and class struggle’ in Africa in recent years, or indeed even in the last year or so, indicated by the contributions by Firoze Manji, Ernest Harsch and Esther Vivas, referred to above. We shall be concerned, therefore, in future issues to examine and to analyse in a more comprehensive fashion the main patterns and trends in the incidents and instances across the continent, and to explore in particular the extent of cooperation between pro-democracy and anti-capitalist movements across countries in Africa to see whether it is possible to discern any sign of a growing integration of these incidents and instances to constitute some kind of pan-African movement – Up-rising Africa – as part of the rise of global dissent (or what some would call ‘anti-capitalism’).

Some recent attempts to explore these issues include ‘African Struggle Today: social movements since independence’, by Peter Dwyer and Leo Zeilig (Haymarket Books, 2012), and Africa Uprising: popular protest and political change’, by Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly (Zed Books, 2015). Also see African Awakening: the emerging revolutions, edited by Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine (Pambazuka Press, 2012) and Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa, edited by Leo Zeilig (Haymarket Books, 2009).

See also the RoAPE article by Leo Zeilig and David Seddon, ‘Class and Protest in Africa: new waves’, RoAPE, 32, 103 (2005)

David Seddon is a researcher and scholar who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.

Notes

[1] Discussed in John Walton & David Seddon (eds), Free Markets and Food Riots: the politics of global adjustment, Blackwells (1994). Also more recently in Leo Zeilig & David Seddon, ‘Class and Protest in Africa: new waves’, Review of African Political Economy, 32, 103 (2005).

[2] African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions (eds) Sokari Ekine & Firoze Manji, 15 Nov 2011.

[3] Ernest Harsch, ‘Social Protest: an African perennial’, African Futures, 7 October 2013. (http://forums.ssrc.org/african-futures/2013/10/07/social-protest-an-african-perennial/#sthash.WV57dwgi.dpuf)

[4] Ernest Harsch, ‘Citizens’ Revolt in Burkina Faso, African Futures, http://forums.ssrc.org/african-futures/2014/12/09/citizens-revolt-in-burkina-faso/; Firoze Manji, ‘Burkina Faso: liberation not looting’, Red Pepper, March 2015

Mozambique: Drop All Charges Against Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco and Fernando Mbanze

ROAPE

September 5, 2015

By Gary Littlejohn

A well-known public intellectual Dr. Castel-Branco and a national newspaper editor Mr. Mbanze are due to go on trial in Mozambique at the end of August, charged with insulting the then President of Mozambique, Armando Guebuza in 2014. It is illegal to insult the President. A new President was elected last year, but the remarks by Castel-Branco on Facebook prior to the last election, remarks which were reproduced in a national newspaper and elsewhere, are not in dispute. That immediately raises the question as to why other media that reproduced these remarks are not also on trial. Given that freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Mozambican Constitution, this raises an important question concerning what the limits of such freedom are in relation to the law against insulting the President. To understand the situation in which these charges were made, some background information should help.

Loss of legitimacy amid increasing problems in Mozambique

Following the end of Apartheid in South Africa and Mozambican multiparty elections in 1994, Mozambique had a period of fairly rapid economic growth from a very low base during the rest of the 1990s. In my view, this had as much to do with regular rainfall as with the economic policies supported by the World Bank, the IMF and European Union. Towards the end of the 1990s, a large project (USD 2 billion) was implemented. It had been arranged with the backing of South African government guarantees and is known as the Maputo Corridor. It included a new aluminium production facility near Maputo, the capital city, as well as a new road from South Africa to Maputo and bauxite supplied from a mine just inside the nearby South African border. Electricity is provided by hydroelectric power from Tete Province to the north of Mozambique.

President Obama greeting President Guebuza at the Africa Summit in Washington, 2014 (Photo: State Department)

By 2003, when this investment had been completed, this capital intensive, low employment approach to growth was a success in terms of GDP growth and the balance of payments, but did nothing to reduce poverty in Mozambique, as a poverty survey in 2002 showed. It was an export oriented, extractive industry model that subsequently relied on encouraging foreign direct investment by tax concessions and few restrictions on repatriation of profits, presumably in the hope that that the resulting infrastructural investment would facilitate other forms of economic activity. In 2010, a second wave of such investment began, this time coming from Brazil, with the main export market expected to be for coal to China. A similar ‘corridor’ approach was again used, with rehabilitated and newly constructed rail links to the coast. Meanwhile a second poverty survey in 2009 showed that poverty had actually increased from around 52% to 54% of the population.

Apart from the problem of ‘jobless growth’ the government had started to lose legitimacy for other reasons largely related to poor management in various ministries that tended to adversely affect those on low incomes. For example, in March 2007 a huge munitions depot in a suburb of Maputo exploded, killing about 500 people and injuring many more. The government was slow to respond to this disaster, which led to very great criticism in the media and the eventual replacement of the then Minister of Defence, who was the brother-in-law of President Guebuza. What made it worse was that a previous President, Samora Machel, had publicly called for this depot to be dealt with in 1986, not long before his death, so this problem was well known to have been neglected for over 20 years. A year or so later the Minister of the Interior was tried and found guilty of corruption.

One index of this declining legitimacy was the decline in the turnout for Presidential and parliamentary elections. In addition, the Frelimo share of the vote went down in both presidential and parliamentary elections from about 75% to about 57% between 2009 and 2014. Another indicator was media criticism of alleged police involvement with organised crime.

The onset of Brazilian investment also led to fairly large scale popular resistance to the effects of such projects, including over claims of forced resettlement, compensation promised but not fully paid, poor quality of land on to which people had been relocated, and so on. Such protests included protests over ‘land grabs’ that were associated with a large multinational project for agribusiness (known as ProSavana) associated with the most northern corridor in Mozambique, the Nacala Corridor. The protests were frequently suppressed by what many considered to be violent police action.

Meanwhile, Mozambican social scientists whose leading figures often had PhDs from European universities were developing high quality published analyses of social and economic problems in Mozambique. The most internationally prominent group was organised in the IESE (Institute of Social and Economic Studies) which had grown originally by consultancy work funded mostly from abroad, but which then also began to hold highly publicised, well organised annual conferences that had prominent national media coverage, including from several TV stations and newspapers. These large conferences included academics from North America, Southern Africa and Europe, and were invariably accompanied by one or two book launches by the IESE itself, as well as other book launches, including in 2012 one by a Japanese academic. Such well publicised critiques and analyses doubtless contributed to a feeling of insecurity in some ruling FRELIMO circles.

Limited resurgence of armed conflict

In April 2013, armed conflict broke out in Sofala Province near the headquarters of the leader of the main opposition party, RENAMO. Its leader Afonso Dhlakama had left Maputo in December 2012, citing a wish to be nearer to the people. This move may have been a response to the declining parliamentary fortunes of RENAMO, and to the fact that he had consistently failed to win the Presidential elections since 1994. Members of the Rapid Intervention Force (FIR), a sort of paramilitary police, had sought to arrest Dhlakama on the charge of holding illegal arms. This attempt had failed but some RENAMO personnel had been arrested and were held in a nearby police station, from which they were ‘rescued’ by other RENAMO members in a fight that included fatalities.

That incident sparked months of low level conflict, including armed raids on traffic on the main north-south highway in Mozambique, and sabotage of rail lines thereby threatening mineral exports. The situation was only partially resolved in time for Dhlakama to register once again for the elections of October 2014, and in some respects it has still not been resolved, with some violence in Tete Province in July 2015. RENAMO disputes the results of the 2014 elections, and is refusing to cooperate with the government in various ways.

The way in which this armed conflict and its related political dispute were handled by President Guebuza drew some further criticism in the media and elsewhere. The general in charge of the Armed Forces for the Defence of Mozambique (FADM) made a public statement near the start of this conflict (April 2013) in which he made it clear that the FADM would not be involved, since it was an internal political matter. Soon afterwards, his contract was not renewed.

Internal FRELIMO Manoeuvres

These various problems have doubtless led to a growing sense of unease within at least some sections of FRELIMO. The situation was exacerbated by an attempt by President Guebuza to have the Constitution changed so that he could try to be elected for a third term. This failed and he then allegedly tried to arrange for a candidate that he preferred to be nominated by FRELIMO, but this too failed. The latter political setback took place at the time of the intractable dispute with RENAMO. It seems fair to comment that President Guebuza’s support for what might be termed neoliberal authoritarian rule was in increasing difficulty by mid-2014, and that some in FRELIMO ruling circles apparently wished to distance themselves from it.

Facebook Remarks

Following a demonstration in 2014, Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco, at that time the Director of the IESE, made some remarks about the demonstration in which he had participated. These remarks on Facebook were soon reproduced in various formats. Castel-Branco was eventually taken in for questioning, but only some time later and after a lot of support had been publicly expressed for him. This initial questioning was reportedly conducted in an orderly quiet manner, almost as if it was a formality, and he was then released.

Click here to read Castel-Branco’s essay, ‘Growth, capital accumulation and economic porosity in Mozambique: social losses, private gains‘ in the ROAPE, 40^th Anniversary Special Issue (vol. 41 no. 143 Supplemental, December 2014) This article was also winner of the Ruth First prize for the best article published by an African-based author published by ROAPE in 2014. See also the ROAPE Briefing on Cistac’s murder by Ana Ganho.

Then in 2015 a lawyer Giles Cistac was assassinated apparently for stating his opinion that a proposal from RENAMO for some kind of political decentralisation was consistent with the Constitution. Cistac had not supported the RENAMO proposal: he had merely given his legal opinion that it was not inherently unconstitutional. It was widely believed that the assassins were supporters of ex-President Guebuza. There was a large public demonstration in protest at this assassination. It was heavily policed and some participants later declared that they had felt intimidated, but there was no violence on either side.

I am told that Castel-Branco was subsequently in touch through Facebook with the group said to include the assassins, debating with them about their worldview. It is in this context that the charges against him were resurrected. Originally the trial was due to take place on August 1^st, but since Castel-Branco was in the UK, it has been postponed. Castel-Branco returned voluntarily to Mozambique, since he feels that the trial is necessary to establish what the limits on free speech are.

A Letter from Carlos Nuno, July 2015

Dear friends,
As you may all know, the general attorney’s office (PGR) case against me is going to trial. I have been charged with crimes against state security for defamation of the then president of the Republic, and the editor of two newspapers that public my Facebook post, Fernando Mbanze and Veloso, have been accused of abused of freedom of press.

Related to this process, I received messages of solidarity from many people and would like to thank you all. It is impossible to describe how important each word and gesture of solidarity from you and many other people are for me, the journalists Fernando Mbanze and Veloso, our families and legal teams. Thank you all.

I would like to take this opportunity to answer some of the questions that some of you have asked.

I am going to Mozambique for the trial because the issues at stake are much bigger than me, because I refuse to be seen as a political exile from my country, because I have not committed any crime, and because if they want to go on trial I will use it, to the best of my ability, as a platform to fight for freedom of expression, for freedom of political debate and thinking, and for an open debate on the social and economic issues that were raised in my Facebook post that is on trial now. Of course, it would be safer and more comfortable if no trial takes place and the case is closed. However, as it is going ahead I should take advantage of it. Whatever the outcome of this trial is, whether I am found guilty or not, if the debate is in the open we win. So, in brief, I am going to Mozambique for the trial.

Some of you asked how they can help. There are many different ways, equally important. Amnesty International is preparing a campaign – you may all receive a petition to sign. The petition is then going to be sent to the Mozambican government, embassies of Mozambique around the world, embassies of foreign countries in Maputo and the media. Signing and circulating such a petition is one for of support. You can also help by circulating your own letters and sending them to the list of institutions I mentioned above. Publication in the Mozambican and foreign media may be useful. You may write to your local representatives. You may refer to my association with SOAS and IDPM/Manchester (where I am an associate researcher), and with ROAPE and JSAS (two of the leading referred journals on Sub-Saharan Africa development) to raise and discuss this case. You may take advantage of any other of your networks to create the support base.

Let me be clear about one point. Of course, I also want to win the trial on personal reasons – as you may all imagine, I don’t want to go to jail, particularly when I have committed no crime. My daughters and son, my close friends and my family don’t want to see me in jail. The same applies to the editors of media fax and canal de Moçambique, Mbanze and Veloso. However, the support, in my opinion, should not focus primarily on my acquittal – that should be one of the outcomes, a very desirable one on personal terms, of a more fundamental struggle – the issues at stake. Hence, the focus should be on the issues – freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of political debate and of the right to exert citizenship, as well as the obligation and exposure of holders of high public office to be accountable and be criticised if they are not. The journalists and I should be acquitted by winning the fundamental issues. Also, any type of campaign should not forget to mention the intense political pressure that has been put on the judicial system from the beginning of this case. If we win the fundamental issues, we win the trial, whatever it’s legal outcome might be.

Also, we need to bear in mind that if the case against me collapses, the case against Mbanze and Veloso must collapse as well.

Some of you asked if they could make financial contributions. I have not defined any budget yet and my lawyer has been working out of solidarity so far. But things might change and I may come to need financial support. I will come back to this later, because I have no clear questions and answers regarding this issue. My oldest daughter, Ruth, had thought about creating a fund that would support my case and similar cases in the future, but that needs a lot more clear thought. Those of you interested in working along these line and that have experience and ideas about how to manage such a thing properly and rigorously, may let me know and I may put you in contact with Ruth.

Someone asked why did I write such a post and whether I was not aware of the consequences. At the end of October 2013, in the midst of an extremely explosive political and economic context, President Guebuza gave an interview to the media in which he said four things that crystallised the focus and tensions of his years of governance: 1) that he trusted completely the security forces and their command and saw no need for re-organization, despite the sharp rise in organized crime, kidnappings and assassination a without anybody being brought to justice, and the role of police and the security forces in political repression. 2) that the media were responsible for the climate of instability and return to war that existed, while the government was open to initiatives; 3) that the criticism of his closed links with private business and his crony capitalism was undeserved because he had transferred all his personal business to his daughter and sons and his friends and family when he became president. And 4) poverty was not falling as fast as expected (it was not falling at all, despite significant acceleration of economic growth) because of people’s mentality and culture of being poor. Things like that were said every day. People talked and complained about these everywhere but no none was coming forward to challenge. So, I did. It was my right and duty as a citizen. As for the consequences I expected: 1) I did not expect that a Facebook post on my timeline would take me to court charged with crimes against state security; 2) I expected that the real crimes against state security would be investigated (crony capitalism, meteoric increase in public debt, political, social and economic exclusion, raise in the number of poor despite acceleration of economic growth, return to war, organized crime, etc.), and they were not. 3) I expect the tone and intensity of criticism and debate to increase, and that has happened and is happening (I am not saying that there is causal relationship with my FB post, but only that my FB post is part of a trend, even if it has also contributed to start such a trend).

Please, feel free to ask me any questions you wish and make any suggestions you may have.
I would like to thank you, once again, for your showing of solidarity and support.

Please, do not forget that we are part of the same fundamental struggle against economic neoliberalism and its financial dominance, against political repression and removal of the rights to protest, strike, contest and chose real alternatives, and a struggle for defining what are the real alternatives. The Tories attack on workers rights, the troika attack on Greece and Portugal, the state and mining capital attack and assassination of miners, the financial capitalism and fascist state attack on alternatives and freedom in Mozambique, are all part of a whole. Let’s fight and win these struggles together. We can only win together.

Thanks,
Carlos Nuno

Please write immediately in English, Portuguese or your own language to your Mozambique embassy or High Commission:

Urging Mozambican authorities to immediately drop all charges against Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco and Fernando Mbanze, as they have been charged solely for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression;
Calling on the authorities to end the practice of harassment and intimidation of people peacefully expressing their views, and to uphold the right to freedom of expression;
Calling on them to repeal all legislation which unduly limits freedom of expression.

See for more information.

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